AI and McMurry: Technology is here and needs to be embraced, not feared
"In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today."
- "In the Year 2525," Zager and Evans, 1969
Almost 55 years ago this month, a song by Denny Zager and Rick Evans peered into the future and found it to be perilous. The song, recorded in one take in a field near Odessa - yes, just west of Abilene - was No. 1 for six weeks.
We're still a long way from 2525, but were folk singers Zager and Evans musical prophets?
The emergence of AI - artificial intelligence - in the mainstream would suggest they had an inkling of what was ahead the same year Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
Nine months ago, ChatGPT was released. It's the product of software firm Open AI and capable of creating human-like text based on past conversations and input on context.
It's called a "language processing tool."
ChatGPT has excited many while causing others concern. Red flags were hoisted on college campuses, where administrators and faculty had to call a time-out and huddle on the sidelines to figure out a game plan on the fly. Would students simply let ChatGPT write their term papers?
Expelliarimus!
As the fall academic term approaches, we talked to representatives of Abilene's three four-year universities about AI's arrival. Actually, it was pointed out, AI has been around for years.
Think Hal 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey," which came out in 1968.
A year before the Zager and Evans' musical warning.
"In the year 5555
Your arms hangin' limp at your sides
Your legs got nothin' to do
Some machine's doin' that for you."
McMurry's take: Face it, AI is here and we need to be there, too
McMurry's Matthew Draud is both fascinated and wary of ChatGPT.
Artificial intelligence is not new to college campuses. A "red flag," if you will, was raised even a decade ago, he said. AI was used as a tool, he said, "to discover situations of academic dishonesty." Programs could be used to determine if the work was original or not.
Sound familiar?
AI overall goes back even further, Draud said. Artificial intelligence has played an increasingly larger role in our lives for years. Did "auto fill" help with your last online purchase or application or search?
"But it certainly has hit this exponential increase in what it's capable of doing," said Draud, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. "Where we stand and where we stood a year are dramatically different."'
Admitting he's a TikTok fan (to follow what's going on education, of course, he said, smiling), Draud started getting feeds "about this interesting thing called ChatGPT, which I had never heard of. When it first came out, there were just a few users who had beta access to it. They were saying, 'Oh my gosh, this is a game-changer.'
"It was November when I started seeing streams about what ChatGPT can do. It became really evident that as a large language processor, it was going to be a complete game-changer."
Yes, there had been applications that students could use "to basically cheat," he said, but those cost money.
ChatGPT offered a free version.
"And it's capable of a lot better writing," Draud said.
Thus, the immediate knee-jerk in the academic world was "students will be cheating left and right," he said. "It will be hard to detect it because the writing will be so good. So human-like. It doesn't have that choppiness that AI applications in the past had."
That led to use of news detectors of AI-generated writing, to mixed success.
Draud called that a "very superficial reaction to something that is far more profound."
What, he wondered, was this going to do to higher education and labor markets?
"Every aspect of humanness is going to be changed by this. What universities do to prepare students for careers is going to change," he said.
Students have been trained to write code. ChatGPT can write code. It's just another language, such as English.
Thus, instruction may not be learning how to code but getting different artificial intelligence models to do the coding as desired.
"By December or January, it became very clear that prompt engineering might be the next big thing," Draud said.
He told McMurry faculty that, yes, plagiarism is a concern, but there's more to this.
"We can worry about that. But the most important thing is understanding how this is going to transform the world and how are we going to transform students in order to live in that new world," he told faculty.
A history professor told students that using ChatGPT is fine to use to write a paper, but he was expecting the student to do the research to provide specific data. ChatGPT data, Draud said, will be far-ranging and is only up to date through 2021.
"I am going to expect that your papers are accurate, so you're going to have to review your papers," Draud said of the prof's plan. "And it says what you want it to say."
The professor had mixed results. Students followed that plan and turned in "some the best papers he's ever read," Draud said. But students who didn't merge AI and their research parameters "turned in some of the worst papers that he had ever gotten. Not the way they were written but in terms of the factual content."
How about teaching, say, future accountants? AI will change their jobs, Draud said.
It can provide flawless auditing. Yet, could AI also be used to "cook the books?"
"I don't think accountants are going to go out of business. They'll make as much money as they have made in the past. The deal is, their jobs will change," Draud said. "What will they be doing? That's what I want my faculty to be thinking about."
And so, Draud said, "It's imperative that we teach our students how to use this technology and not prevent them from using it. That would be absolutely the wrong instinct."
McMurry's IT staff at first said it could shut down ChatGPT.
Draud balked at that suggestion, saying it would confine students. And maybe chase them off.
"We want them to be able to use that model," he said, in a way that is educationally beneficial to students, not just conveniently beneficial.
Yet, what about creativity? Or sincerity?
Draud said Vanderbilt caught flak for issuing a ChatGPT condolence statement after the student shooting in February at Michigan State. An apology had to be issued.
Draud then considered that people send Hallmark cards, signing a prewritten message.
"We do this all the time. We allow other people to express our thoughts," he said. Now it would be a computer. Yet, he added, people most often fall back on most common human sentiment: You are in our thoughts and prayers.
Draud paused.
"I really am struggling with this," he said of balancing technology with the human element. HI vs. AI. Creativity is the sum of a person's life experiences, which a computer program can assemble but not feel. Yet AI is providing the sum of a million more experiences and information.
That could be amazing.
Bottom line for McMurry, he said, is approaching AI from three directions:
Preparing students for a world in which AI will be vital and prominent
Discouraging them from taking educational shortcuts by using AI
Employing AI to better teach students
"Those are the three things that have been on my radar," he said.
This article originally appeared on Abilene Reporter-News: AI & McMurry: Technology is here and needs to be embraced, not feared
