Science Friday - How A University Is Adjusting One Year After ChatGPT

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

One year ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot that can generate shockingly convincing text. Since then, it has become a center of gravity in the tech industry, as software companies race to integrate the new tech into their products. It’s also sparked concern in the education world, with teachers and parents fearing how students may use it to cheat, and whether it will keep young people from learning writing skills.So what might adjusting to this new technology look like, one year in? Ira sits down with Dr. Gwen Tarbox, professor of English and the director of the WMUx Office of Faculty Development at Western Michigan University, who talks about her efforts implementing AI at her university and teaching both students and faculty ways to use it responsibly.To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

ChatGPT was released a year ago, so how have schools adjusted since then? I just hope that everybody takes some time to learn more about this technology because it's going to impact our young people for the rest of their lives. It's Monday, November 13th, and you thought right, it's Science Friday. I'm CyFar producer, D. Peter Schmidt. When ChatGPT was released last year, many schools banned the technology, citing how it could be used for cheating and essay plagiarism. But now, a lot of those bands have been lifted.

So we thought it was a good time to check in on how this is all going. Ira Flato talks to one English professor about her efforts to teach students and her fellow faculty on the best way to use the tech in the classroom. I'm joined by Dr. Gwentarbach's professor of English at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. She's helping to lead the university's implementation of generative AI in classrooms and teach not just students but faculty on responsible ways to use it. Starbucks, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Let's talk about a lot of schools are banning this technology, right? But many have reversed course on these bands. Why is that?

Well, I think that whenever a new technology is released, especially one that has so much of impact, it can be very frightening at first for anyone, especially for, you know, humanities faculty, for whom this may have been absolutely new information. Our whole identities as academics are often wrapped up in our ability to write and to teach critical thinking and to think that a bot who didn't have 30 years of training could come up with some responses that sound a lot like our own can be very, very intimidating. So what has the reaction been like at your own school among the faculty and students? Well, you know, one of the things I'll say is I also, in addition to being a professor of English, I also direct the Office of Faculty Development within WMU, which is our university's innovation hub. And when OpenE. AI released ChatGPT, we sat down and we really started to think about that, Ira, because our job is to make sure that we're supporting our faculty. And so one of the things that we realized right away was that faculty were going to have very different responses.

For some folks in our College of Business, for instance, they welcomed it. They know that industry is going to want it from their graduates, but from folks in other colleges where that wasn't the case, we wanted to support them too. But what we knew was we wanted everyone to be informed so they knew what they were talking about. We wanted an AI competent campus. And so, of course, there were folks on campus who were immediately concerned, wanted to ban it in their classes, and that's their right. But what we started to do is to offer trainings which allowed folks to learn about how generative AI works, to get an understanding of how it might actually be helpful to them with teaching and learning,

and also to help them meet with our instructional designers to come up with other alternatives. Did you think, did you find that there were a lot of misconceptions about how it worked? There are both misconceptions about how it worked. And also people were putting in prompts that weren't particularly well generated and then using the fact that those chatbots perhaps misattributed their work. I'm sort of thinking, well, then, you know, this can't be that effective of a technology. And so, you know, part of our job was to show them, well, let's take a lot of it. look at when it's prompted well and actually what that means, you can see, wait a minute, it is actually really good at tutoring students or other things like that. But what we did was

we worked with our English department and the director of first year writing, Brian Goggin, to come up with a chorus called AI writing prompt and response that we're currently offering. And that's been really exciting because a lot of our students have had the opportunity to work with AI. Another thing you were talking about academic honesty, and we take that seriously at Western. And we did a series of workshops in August about encouraging faculty to talk to students about their AI policies on the first day of class. Because, as you can imagine, IRA, students were going from classroom to classroom and receiving very different information depending upon the faculty members. And we wanted to make sure that students were well informed about how their particular faculty members felt. So really, as we work to create an ethical framework for AI on our campus,

campus, everyone can participate, whether they are on the AI bandwagon or not. And how have the students responded to your prompts and responses AI class? It's been excellent. It's a high-flex class. So actually, not only have we had students here at Western, but we've had students from around the world taking the course. And they've learned the basics of prompting. And now they are creating a project related to their particular discipline where a chatbot could be useful, either in processing data or teaching information. And that showcase is actually available for anyone who wants to attend. All of our trainings are open access. We'll tell you, Ira, there's been a lot of interests nationally in this. We've had over 2,000 people attend our trainings, and 44% of them are actually

outside our own university. I'm ready to sign up. Well, we would love to have you come. It's December 7th. Join us. It's from 4 to 5 p.m. But I mean, on a really serious note, We have been very proactive because we want our university to be one that students look at and say, hey, this is a place where they're taking this seriously. They know I need to be career ready or that I need to at least encounter this before I go out into the world. And so we're really trying to do that for our students and our faculty. Now, one of the underlying tensions regarding the use of AI in education is around equity, because on one hand, you can use this tool as an extremely flexible learning partner,

have it to adapt your learning style no matter your means to hire a tutor. Right. But on the other hand, you can read this as cementing our reliance on big tech and increasing the societal disparities, right, in the long term. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I think that the people who are most likely to make changes that will be positive are our current class of students. They will be the people for whom their entire careers,

will be impacted by this. We have to look at that as a reality. And my thinking on this is if our students have had a chance to practice this kind of technology and have been exposed to information on bias and ethics, that at least when our students go out into the world, they are prepared to raise those concerns and questions and the jobs that they hold. That's pretty much what a university can do. We can't put our head in the sand. And we're certainly not going to affect policy if we are under-informed. So I believe that those concerns are absolutely serious and top shelf, but also we want to make sure that our students get to have a voice in what happens next. Right, right. And how about data privacy, especially with youngsters? Because they're inputting, right, potentially sensitive data into these models. And there's not real transparency about how it's used or is connected to the user, is there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that's a little bit frustrating is we are lagging behind the EU.

in terms of those kinds of protections nationally. You can see that some universities are trying to handle this by setting up these closed systems. And just recently, the ability for even individuals to set up a closed AI system has become more accessible. So I think that's going to be the route that people will want to be taking, is looking at ways to protect individual users within a classroom,

but also just helping our students to learn how to read contracts. Yeah. Because, you know, one of the first things that Dr. Goggan did in his class was have the students review the terms and conditions for these various corporations. The Euler can be pretty long at the end of these things. Yeah. You know, Science Friday's education team has recently hosted a Zoom event about the future of AI in education. And I want to play you this comment from a high school junior, Sebastian Rowe, about regulating this in school. There needs to be these type of AI regulation policies in place that don't outright ban AI,

but instead provide garrails for educators and students right now because that's lacking. A lot of students don't really know what to think about a lot of these technologies. Some are confused about, you know, what is AI, what does AI mean? Is it cheating in certain circumstances? Yeah, what do you think of that? I think he's absolutely right. That's one of the reasons why we have done 20 trainings for our faculty on the various aspects of this, including an entire training on privacy.

because we want to make sure that our educators are aware of what they're sharing with their students. But we also need our high school educators, our college educators, to understand sort of the really uncanny and strange experience of doing a lot of work with a chat bot. Because Ira, I'll tell you, I'm 60 years old, and, you know, I should be getting ready to retire. And this is the first development that has come along in the last like 10 years of my career that has made me say, you know what, I want to stick around longer. I'm very interested in what this is going to mean for authorship, what it's going to mean for, like so many English professors, their identity is based on having spent 30 years becoming these experts. And I programmed Claude, which is Anthropics

chatbot that we've been using a lot, to write just like me. And it took me about an hour. And it's shocking. The result of that was I had a little existential crisis. I stepped away from the computer and just called my friend Dave. And I was like, Dave, I'm really, really, really freaking out here, you know? And even talking to my dissertation students, one of them said to me this week, you are so lucky. No one ever questioned that you wrote your dissertation. Now people will wonder, did I really write? It wasn't me. And I said to her, well, actually, look at it this way. What it means to write is going to change in your lifetime and you'll get to be one of the people who decides what that means. But the thing is, Ira, having that experience allowed me to understand. And

the chat bot far better than I had before if I hadn't spent all those hours sort of prompting it and learning it. And now I'm much better prepared to write a syllabus when I next teach because I know what it can do. And this is a conversation that I want to have, an open conversation with my students so that we can talk about how we'll use it in my class and come up with a joint agreement about what is acceptable and what isn't. faculty and high school teachers need to feel comfortable opening up with students and having these conversations so that everyone's on the same page. Do you think that other teachers need to have this existential feeling, this existential experience? I think we all do because in order to become active participants in creating the future of what happens with AI and our culture, we need to understand what it can do and what it can't do as well. And also, the

The only way to have a voice really is to demand it. Well, Dr. Tarbach, you sound like a very dedicated and driven teacher, and I thank you for the work that you do. Well, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you today, and I just hope that everybody takes some time to learn more about this technology because it's going to impact our young people for the rest of their lives. Dr. Gwen Tarbock, professor of English at Western Michigan University.

And that's about all the time we have for today. a lot of people help make the show happen, including Sandy Roberts, Beth Ramey, John Dan Kosky, and many more. Next time, it's Decorative Gord season. We're talking squash science and how pumpkins can grow to over 2,000 pounds. We'll catch you then. But for now, I'm SciFri producer Dee Petersmith. See ya.