P romise and potential? Or peril and pitfall?

These days, the subject of artificial intelligence is rife with the headiness of what it can accomplish versus people’s fear of the unknown. Will this rapidly evolving technology take over, destroying jobs and shoving humans aside?

In particular, how will it impact higher education?

Universities nationwide are turning to Georgia College & State University’s Professor of Secondary Education Dr. Cynthia Alby for answers.

She started with a workshop on AI at Mercer University in January and has gone on to give more than 40 seminars throughout the United States. She was interviewed on “Teaching in Higher Ed,” a premier podcast. She published an article on AI for “Faculty Focus” and is part of the University System of Georgia’s webinar series on AI.

Her recommendation: Go with the flow. Writing will change. But everyone should use it.

                                                           

                                                           Click here for this writer’s experience using AI.

Late last year—after the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT—Alby was recovering from surgery. Her friend and colleague Dr. Elissa Auerbach, professor of art history, asked what she thought of the new technology. Alby had never heard of it. With time on her hands, she dove right in.

She asked AI to write a grant for “innovative classroom furniture.”

It immediately produced a funding proposal with all the right parts. Its ability to think, describe the furniture and realize its importance in a classroom setting—all from a simple prompt—was startling.

 

“My heart started pounding really hard. It's one of the strongest, weirdest emotions I've ever felt in my life,” Alby said. “I felt incredibly giddy and incredibly horrified at the exact same moment. It was just surging through my head, kind of sitting there and looking at it, because I was like, ‘What the hell just happened? How? How is this possible?’”

“And that was the original 3.5 version,” she said. “The newer ChatGPT 4.0 came out a few months later, and many say it’s as much as 10 times better.”

Companies have released new versions of AI since then. Only two are worth using in Alby’s opinion, one through Microsoft Bing and the other ChatGPT 4.0.

Now, if you’re a grant writer, Alby said you don’t have to write every word. All you really have to do is analyze the output, making sure it’s correct. With AI, a grant writer could generate 70% more.

This could mean great things for faculty, staff and students in higher education.

AI quickly creates lists of titles, books, documentaries and supplies to supplement curriculum. It can write first drafts, giving writers ideas. Or AI can edit, fix grammatical errors, simplify sentences and shorten length.

It can imitate writing style, like Shakespearean, and give photos a futuristic, Renoir or comical vibe. It can imitate art—but not oil paint with textured strokes. Yet.

Although AI is leaping forward—scaring even its own creators at times by learning on its own—Alby remains optimistic. In the beginning, a slide in her workshops listed all the things artificial intelligence couldn’t do.

“Pretty quickly, things started changing,” Alby said. “By March, everything on the list was crossed off.”

While some may panic, Alby said ChatGPT could be a blessing.

Humans are “extremely social” in their learning, therefore she believes teachers will always be necessary. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it quickly became evident that computer learning is only good in short spurts.

Professors are still needed for inspiration, solving problems and mentoring. Humans need humans.

An expert in course design, Alby said AI is becoming a great asset in planning lessons. In the past, when she asked students to prepare their first unit—it “was like pulling teeth.” This year, she allowed them to use AI.

“The first lesson plan—their novice brains were ready to explode with the complexity of it and all the moving parts. It would take forever, forever to get the first ones written,” Alby said. “But this year, the very first thing they produced was pretty darn good. How much more exciting is that, than clawing your way through it?”

 

The art of lesson planning won’t be lost with AI, she said, because a person has to feed it instructions and information.

A person must tell AI where to make changes, how to reorganize and whether a document needs updates. That requires “a lot of higher-order thinking, evaluation and analysis,” Alby said. “You still have to understand what you’re asking it for. AI requires a lot of direction. No amount of AI will help if you don't understand the criteria.’’

In the end, a lesson plan needs a human to execute it.

With this in mind, Alby believes students should be allowed to use AI.

It helps them formulate ideas, learn complicated processes and elevate their work. Students may ask AI to offer a counter argument or suggest missing elements in their writing. It will become a tool for polishing final results.

It also saves time.

 A unit plan once took 10 to 20 hours to complete. It only takes AI a few.

 

“We can't put our heads in the sand,” Alby said. “At this point, virtually every job we prepare people for is going to be heavily impacted by AI within a year or two. If we aren't preparing students to face that—we aren’t preparing our students well.”

“So my thought is, why don't we all learn to use it?” she said. “By learning to use it wisely and ethically, we'll have a better sense of how the future needs to be directed. Whereas if you haven't even played with it, how can you have an opinion or make a suggestion on how to use it?”

Let students have at it. That’s Alby’s plan.

Allowance takes away the mystery, leading to proper use. Make students show how they incorporated AI in their work. On her website, Alby has tools and tactics for creating engaging, interactive lessons using AI. She has a list of resources and collection of ‘cut-and-paste’ prompts for educators to use.

She admits jobs will be lost as society adapts.

But others will arise.

Mostly, people will produce better results with AI. Mediocre workers will improve; good workers will move “to a phenomenal level,” Alby said. AI will become a collaborator in human endeavors.

Beyond the College of Education, other disciplines will benefit.

In biology, many recent experiments involve protein folding, but it’s “unbelievably” time consuming, Alby said. AI can fold proteins 1,000 times faster, she said, allowing scientists to work quicker and produce higher-quality results.

In marketing and business, AI is seen as a plus. But for English majors, Alby said there could be bumps in the road. Writing will change, becoming more of a partnership with AI. In fact, she thinks assignments like traditional essays and literature papers will need to be redesigned.

Now, the only writing teachers can be certain comes from students is what’s written by hand in the classroom. There’s no way to detect what’s done by students or AI—except students may hand in perfect assignments with zero errors.

Telling students they can’t won’t stop them, Alby said. They’ve already learned how to use AI through TikTok videos.

 

“For any professors out there who are a little bit worried,” Alby said, “my advice is to let students use AI. Take something that used to be a writing assignment and make it multimedia. So, even if students are using AI, they couldn’t use it as heavily, and there’ll be a lot of decision making.”

The future depends on the choices we make.

Prohibition, surveillance, clamping down or punishment would be “terrible choices” and things could get “very ugly,” Alby said. She imagines a future of pluses—where artificial intelligence is used wisely.

“It’s something we really have to think about. It's not an easy ‘Go left’ or ‘Go right’ decision,” Alby said. “Every professor is going to have to understand how to use it. It’s hard to argue with the fact that students are going into this world, and we’re tasked with preparing them for their next step.”

“That’s literally the root of our job,” she said, “and if we’re not doing that, it creates a problem. We need to prepare students for the workforce of tomorrow. If they're coming out of here with a strong ability to utilize AI, they’ll get hired.”