Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, so can it be used for good in higher education?
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CounterCurrent:
Nemesis or Sidekick?
Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, so can it be used for good in higher education?
CounterCurrent is the National Association of Scholars’ weekly newsletter, bringing you the biggest issues in academia and our responses to them.
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Category: Artificial Intelligence, Future of Higher Education;
Reading Time: ~4 minutes
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** Featured Article: AI in the Campus Art Gallery: A Way to Supersede Academic Silos ([link removed])
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay, so why not utilize it to benefit academia?
In the first of a thought-provoking two-part article ([link removed]) series on Minding the Campus, Joe Nalven explores the idea that AI can be used beneficially in the university. He believes that “AI can be a method to reconfigure university education—not in its totality, but as a way to integrate and reintegrate learning across disciplinary silos.” This is certainly an interesting idea, but why AI is necessary to undermine disciplinary silos and how it can do so must be fleshed out first.
Educational fields often become siloed, and have done so since the medieval university. This is a problem still facing the modern university, one that shields the “larger educational enterprise from cross, multi, trans, and inter-disciplinary practices—not to mention how education maps onto reality outside the university.” Many colleges and universities fail to de-silo academic fields on their own, and lose out on congruent research opportunities and more institutional depth. Nalven proposes a solution possible with AI,
All communication within each and every discipline—whether mathematical symbols, human language, research reports, publications, lectures, designs, plans, robotics, image generation, speech recognition, computer vision, and on and on—is reducible to code ([link removed]) . Machine language, now structured as Large Language Models (LLM), can talk across these ostensibly separate fields of inquiry.
Nalven’s thought process led him to pose a question to Bard, an AI chatbot, asking it “Would AI LLMs undermine academic silos since LLMs code all information that can cross disciplinary boundaries?” Suffice to say, the chatbot’s response was thorough, and that “yes … AI LLMs have the potential to revolutionize the way we do research and scholarship.” This is because AI LLMs can process information faster while exploring new ideas and possibilities—without human restraint.
Now comes the how. Nalven suggests a hypothetical art exhibit as means to challenge an institution’s disciplinary silos, co-curated by a LLM and a human. He writes,
Wearing an artist’s hat, I propose a campus art gallery as a framework to discuss how AI can re-integrate several university disciplines—art practice, art history, semantics, cognitive science, computer programming, data training for LLMs, bias, law, economics, epistemology, and more. A campus art gallery can reintegrate education with an LLM model that is part curator of existing data and part generative tool that can create new data combinations. Other places in the university can illustrate additional examples of re-integrating disciplinary silos.
Nalven’s points are an intriguing thought experiment. If AI is in fact “here to stay,” shouldn’t colleges and universities find a way to utilize it for good? Already, students abuse AI to write papers, translate passages of text, cheat on tests, and more. So rather than continue to feed into the “don’t use it because I said so” modus operandi—where administrators and professors believe if they ignore AI’s existence and merely tell students not to use it, problems created by AI will simply vanish—wouldn’t it be better to employ AI capabilities to enhance research and improve educational experience?
It is not an understatement to say that AI is a controversial topic, and one that’s been highly debated ([link removed]) . Some people feel strongly one way or the other about AI, and the rest are in between. Perhaps the answer is to employ AI in the way Nalven suggests. Perhaps there’s another way to employ AI, or not at all. Either way, this merits further discussions on the direction of higher education with and without AI, as we grapple with the myriad of problems created by humans. All food for thought.
Until next week.
Kali Jerrard
Communications Associate
National Association of Scholars
Read the Article ([link removed])
For more on AI and the future of higher ed:
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November 09, 2023
** Weird Is What We Need ([link removed])
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Jared Gould
Is there hope for higher education? If so, it will be found at the University of Austin (UATX). UATX is dedicated to nurturing a new generation of American leaders, emphasizing qualities like grace, determination, and gratitude in its students who are driven to innovate and create.
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May 19, 2023
** VIDEO: AI and ChatGPT. Should We Be Worried? ([link removed])
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National Association of Scholars
This webinar discusses whether or not AI and ChatGPT will change the world as we know it, and what challenges come along with this developing technology.
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March 02, 2023
** Calculus Without Fear ([link removed])
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Kent Osband
Artificial intelligence is becoming too important for people not to appreciate its core mathematical foundations in calculus, probability theory, and linear algebra.
** About the NAS
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