Campus Technology Insider Podcast February 2024
Rhea Kelly 27:14
How do you balance some of the, like the risk concerns, maybe like privacy risk and things like that, with the, you know, the desire to not constrain the use with guidelines?
David Wiley 27:29
Well, I think you can inform people fully and effectively without constraining their choice. Right? I think, I think really empowering them to exercise their agency is, is a function of making sure that they understand the choices that they're making. So I think it is important to talk about risks, pros, cons, etc. But I think, I think it's too early to cross the line kind of beyond informing and empowering, and into constraining and confining.
Rhea Kelly 28:05
So I wanted to make sure we talked about the equity side of things. Because, you know, like, when you have a huge research university like ASU, obviously they can put a lot of resources toward this exploration and experimentation. But what about small colleges or community colleges? If they can't afford to invest in this essential part of the tech stack, is that an equity gap that's going to impact students?
David Wiley 28:29
Yeah, it would 100% be an equity gap. As with all technology, and actually, as we just saw with OpenAI's Developer Day not that long ago, every year, the models become more powerful and they become less expensive. That's the trend that technology typically takes, right? It gets less expensive and more powerful. I think that trend will eventually make it possible, maybe not for every college to run the latest version of Chat GPT that was just released last week, but there will be, there will absolutely be someone, multiple vendors who are offering affordable models, that have been fine-tuned for higher ed use cases, that will be, that will cost something on the scale of what the LMS costs. Right? Well, that cost has to get down to the place where it's affordable for the institution, no matter which institution it is. Because even, even the smallest colleges and universities — I live in West Virginia, where we have several colleges that have fewer than 2,000 full-time students — they all have a learning management system. You know it, the market will make those available in a way that they can be afforded by those institutions. On the flip side, I think if the LMS is one metaphor, I think another interesting metaphor, as technical infrastructure for society more broadly, for thinking about generative AI, is broadband. I will just give away the whole game and say I very clearly remember my 14.4k modem that I used to connect to the internet back in the day, and how exciting it was when 28.8 was a thing and how exciting it was when 56k was a thing, and internet just kept getting faster and faster. The, eventually society, at least in the United States, we came to this consensus, that access to high speed internet is something that's just really important for everyone to have. It's important for school, it's important for work, it's important for all these reasons. And so today, there are state-level and federal programs that subsidize access to broadband. Because there's a recognition that that's an important thing for every student to be able to do their homework online and for entrepreneurs to start businesses and for people to be able to do remote work or whatever it might be. It's just important enough that we provide subsidies for that. And I think you'll see that generative AI will end up being in the same category. I just, I can't believe that we're that far away from some programs to subsidize access to these tools as well, because obviously you have to have an internet connection to access them, but I think they're arguably more powerful and more important to have access to, maybe even than the internet.
Rhea Kelly 31:32
So I want to end with kind of a looking forward kind of question: What would you say would be the, sort of the most exciting trend in generative AI to watch this year?