#1661 Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a New Constitution for the United States

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

Frequent guest Beau Breslin of Skidmore College and one of his prize students, Prairie Gunnels, talk about a capstone project for Beau’s Introduction to American Politics Course, in which students used the AI tool, ChatGPT, to write a new constitution for each of the seven generations that now share American soil. Professor Breslin is fully aware of the disruptive nature of Artificial Intelligence in the university classroom. Still, he decided to harness it for the good and encourage his students to use it responsibly to gather data essential to any possible new Constitution of the United States. Prairie Gunnels explained the methodology she used to give ChatGPT the information it needed to compose these draft constitutions. It turns out, for example, that on the whole, each generation wants to preserve the right to keep and bear arms. However, younger generations are much more comfortable with installing regulations to prevent mass shootings and mayhem. We discussed how to constitute a new generation of “founders,” provide them with the necessary information to draft a constitution, and then create a ratification system that is fair and representative. This podcast was recorded on July 10, 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's podcast. I'm Clay Jenkinson. So I'm having the time of my life out here.
0:07.2	But Bo and I have been talking for a long time about constitutions, and he's one of the few people who agrees with me that Jefferson was right when he said we need to tear up the Constitution every 19 years or so, so that we have fresh ideas and we're not prevented
0:23.0	from important change by the straitjacket of the past. You know, he famously said we may as well
0:28.9	require a man to wear the coat that fitted him as a child as to require our civilized citizens
0:36.3	to live under the order of barbarism from the past.
0:40.2	And I agree with that.
0:41.3	We need to tear up the Constitution and start over.
0:44.1	And Bo and his prize student Prairie Gunnells came up with by using AI, chat GPT, is that there are seven generations in this
0:57.9	society now, beginning with the greatest generation and ending with Alpha, the brand new generation,
1:04.9	and that they together, in class, not just Prairie, but others in her class with their instructor,
1:14.6	their professor, Bo Breslin, created a new constitution for each of the seven generations
1:22.6	or by each of the seven generations using Chat GPT.
1:25.6	And this is Bo's way of coming to terms with AI
1:29.1	rather than simply forbidding it. Remember, if you're old enough when pocket calculators
1:35.2	were forbidden in math classes or physics classes, today that's just a ludicrous notion. And so
1:42.4	technology has a way of making us come to terms with it, whether we like it or not.
1:47.4	And so it's a really ingenious thing, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing the results
1:51.6	of what they have done in creating seven new constitutions with seven new preambles
1:58.7	and seeing how each generation would configure the country a little bit
2:03.7	differently for its own aspirations and its own sense of what's at stake. That kind of process
2:10.7	is the best gift we could give to the United States as it approaches its 250th birthday next July 4th,
2:19.6	that our Constitution, in my opinion, is broken.
	...

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