ASU reflects on first semester with Open AI partnership
On Wednesday, more than 500 Arizona State University IT staff gathered to explore the potential of Artificial Intelligence in improving the community, utilizing the tool itself. This initiative is just one of many where staff, students, and faculty have integrated this technology, which was made available for the first time this past semester.
ASU's chief information officer, Lev Gonick, expressed, "The future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed. So, here at ASU, we’re leaning into how AI is going to evolve and help us change."
The Implementation Challenge
At the beginning of the year, the university challenged its faculty and staff to brainstorm ways AI could benefit a university environment. Since then, ASU has received over 400 proposals and is currently supporting 250 of them.
In one instance, assistant professor Jake Greene incorporated ChatGPT in a graduate-level writing course. Students utilized the tool for various tasks such as prompts, work reviews, and idea generation for essays. Greene noted, "Students are bringing a lot of creativity and personality to something that can feel very nebulous and hard to grasp."
Personal Experiences with ChatGPT
PhD student Stephanie Leow shared that ChatGPT served as a valuable supplement to her work, providing a fresh perspective and creative influence. She mentioned, "Most of the time I’m typically translating what it gave me to my own words back again. 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 emphasized that the efficacy of ChatGPT varies across different classes and situations, suggesting that educators should focus on teaching AI literacy to ensure students use it responsibly and effectively. He added, "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."
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