TEMPE, AZ — On Wednesday, more than 500 Arizona State University IT staff came together to brainstorm how Artificial Intelligence can be used to better the community, using the tool itself.
It’s just one way of hundreds that staff, students and faculty have put the technology into place, allowed for the first time this past semester.
“The future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed,” ASU chief information officer Lev Gonick said. “So, here at ASU, we’re leaning into how AI is going to evolve and help us change.”
The university sent out a challenge to faculty and staff in January; to come up with ways AI can be used in a university.
Since then, ASU has received more than 400 proposals and the university is now supporting 250 of them.
In assistant professor Jake Greene’s graduate-level writing course, he said students used ChatGPT for specific prompts, work reviews, notes, and to bounce off ideas during essays among other things.
“I would say it’s been a success, probably with an asterisk. I would say, students are bringing a lot of creativity and personality to something that can feel very nebulous and hard to get your head around.” Greene said.
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PhD student Stephanie Leow said the tool was best used as an aid to her work when she needed a creative boost or new ways to look at different topics.
“Most of the time I’m typically translating what it gave me to my own words back again,” Leow said. “I have a good sense of how I like to sound and my own argument which is often more complex than what ChatGPT would produce.”
Greene said the tool is best used differently depending on the class and situation. He recommends educators teach about AI literacy, so students learn how to use it effectively and ethically.
“It’s a different conversation if it’s maybe a first-year writing course,” Green said. “Obviously we don’t want a world where everyone sounds like ChatGPT, that’s no fun and that’s not what we’re trying to do.”
