People who can help educate on the pros and cons of artificial intelligence have the opportunity to hone their skills.
The Augusta University Center for Writing Excellence (CWE) is offering a series of workshops to faculty and staff so they will better understand the growing field.
“This is part of a certificate program for the Office of Institutional Access, Success and Belonging,” Dr. James Garner, CWE Associate Director Center, explained for ABD. “For this certificate program, workshops that help them learn about what it means to create access, success, and belonging on a college campus.”
Garner said the workshop draws interest from across the faculty and staff of the university, from administrators to educators. He said the diversity of attendees can be challenging to address each one’s specific needs.
Garner said the reality is AI is not new. It can trace its roots back to English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turning. Voice-to-text transcription services are a type of basic AI.
The difference is the emergence of “generative” AI that can create new content including text, images, and music along with audio and video projects.
“So, given that there were so many questions about the rise of artificial intelligence, particularly generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT and what kinds of effects those are going to have on our workplaces and on our staffs, but also on our students and faculty and basically everybody,” he said. “It’s changing every single industry. Higher education is not excluded from that. In fact, higher education, I think, felt it first and fastest, probably in a lot of ways.”
Garner led the participants through a series of slides, outlining the good and the bad of generative AI.
On the negative side is the threat of dependency, that users can rely on the program rather than develop their expertise. The systems themselves have vulnerabilities.
“They’re trained on these massive data sets, but those data sets are limited, meaning that they produce incorrect information. The charming term they use for this is “hallucinating” information, where it just very confidently makes stuff up,” said Garner.
“Another one that I find really fascinating is this problem of catastrophic forgetting,” he added. “This is where people over-rely on the technology, and they put so much information into it that they’ve put all their work into it. They’ve used it for months and months and months, and then suddenly the AI forgets what you’ve given it. You’ve got to ask it a question about something you were working on fairly recently, and the memory is just so exhausted, it’s not able to keep up, and it’s not able to remember what you told it, because it has to get rid of old information in order to make room for the new information.”
Garner said there are concerns about potential plagiarism that are still being addressed. He advised the group not to use a generative AI-produced document without reviewing it with an eye for errors and without editing it with a more distinctive touch.
It is one of several topics offered under the umbrella of the university’s certificate program. It offers a micro-credential for individuals who complete the program within 12 months.
“Once our participants complete their program, at the end of the academic year, we do a celebration to award the certificates out,” said Jashawn Bowls, Administrative assistant with the Office of Access, Success, and Belonging. “They also get a credential they can have on their LinkedIn account, as well as different departments. They look at those things for professional development, to further in those careers.”
Other topics for the summer workshops include Emotional Intelligence and Embracing Accessibility: A Journey to Disability Awareness.
Garner said the next AI workshop will be in August.
For more information if you are a university faculty or staff member or to register:
www.augusta.edu/asb/certificateprogram.php
