October 13, 2023, 2-3pm
Thanks, Sharon, for organizing this conversation. I'm eager to hear your thoughts and learn from your experiences with AI.
I am no AI expert. At best I am an early adopter.
I first noticed AI text generation in 2015 when the NYT published If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?
I set my Google News Feed to send articles about AI. The first link I recorded is dated 2016.
Since then I've collected over 300 articles, more in the last year than in the previous five. These, along with direct personal experience and conversations with colleagues and students comprise what I know about AI. Taken together these articles demonstrate the loud level of engagement this topic has generated, from ecstasy to terror with some thoughtful moments in between. The pessimists think AI will eliminate nearly all white collar jobs and gut the Humanities. The optimists think it will level the communications playing field, raze the Tower of Babel, make us all proficient coders, and improve office productivity by at least 40%.
I vacillate between enthusiasm and paralysis on an almost hourly basis. AI has saved me hours writing and many hours coding. But it has cost me many hours wondering how Generation AI's minds will differ from ours. We won't know until 2041 when Generation AI arrives at GSU. I'll be long gone. But the parents of those children are with us now. What they learn from us may inform what they impart to them.
I don't know if AI's influences will be positive or negative. Probably a mixed bag, like most things, but I do know they are already changing the way I read and write, learn and teach.
Writing with and for robots -- the more you know about your subject matter and the better you are at crafting prompts, the more powerful and useful AI can be. There's a learning curve and the tools are evolving so regular attention is needed.
One of the ways AI has changed the way I write. I'm still pondering how to indicate AI's lines among my own.
An example of how AI is changing my course design practices.
At any rate, I know from the survey that many of you have as much experience with AI as I have. Some of you much more. So where shall we go from here? The slate of possible reactions to AI? Assignments? Prompt-crafting? What do we want to talk about?