Recent developments in artificial intelligence can generate surprisingly high-quality and natural-sounding text and creative visual art. AI is poised to transform a wide variety of industries and disciplines, including higher education. It offers both risk and opportunity to the way we teach, the skills that students will need upon graduation, and how we assess their progress toward those outcomes.
In our first panel on AI, we focused on the immediate impact that AI (and particularly ChatGPT) is having on teaching and learning. In this second panel, NIU faculty with extensive expertise in AI discussed the ways that AI is changing the world that we live in and the careers our students are pursuing. Our expert panelists included:
- Ann Dzuranin, Department of Accountancy
- David Gunkel, Department of Communication
- Andrea Guzman, Department of Communication
- Maoyuan Sun, Department of Computer Science
The panelists shared some amazing insights, including:
- AI is not new, despite recent awareness of it. In journalism, for example, AI has been used for 5-10 years, and the same is true in other industries. According to Dr. Gunkel, “We are not looking at a future robot invasion. We are living through the robot invasion right now.”
- Digital and information literacy are more important now than ever, particularly due to the potential for misinformation and bias. We need to prepare students to think about artificial intelligence in their disciplines and careers but also at a larger societal level. Dr. Sun pointed out that AI is a black box where you cannot fully see what is happening and cannot fully trust it. Dr. Gunkel discussed efforts to regulate AI’s use to generate disinformation, but acknowledged that it has not been possible for officials to keep up with the rapid changes in the field.
- Without the knowledge and ability to work with AI, we may see an even wider digital divide that worsens existing equity gaps and social inequities. Dr. Dzuranin commented, “In Business, we see that a lot of the jobs that are being automated by robotics and AI are lower level jobs, which does exacerbate the divide.”
- In many industries, AI is not replacing jobs so much as it is automating aspects of the job to increase productivity. For example, Dr. Guzman mentioned the use of AI in journalism to monitor social media or to analyze large sets of documents or paperwork – types of investigative work that are not possible for an individual on their own.
- While ChatGPT is getting a lot of attention, there are many other tools for producing creative works via AI, like DALL-E or MidJourney for creating images, plus tools for generating voices, music, and video.
- There are a lot of concerns regarding privacy, ethics, and the long term impact of AI that we need to consider. Dr. Sun also reflected on the possibility that AI content “will directly impact people’s thoughts, and then the whole workflow shifts toward the direction that was started by AI,” and all of the panelists stressed the need to address privacy and ethics of AI when working with students.
