Campus Technology Insider Podcast April 2024
Lev Gonick 12:43
They are, and Rhea, I mean the reality is, again, with the introduction of any new technology, we don't want to turn this into like a high-stakes, high-risk experience. We want to turn this into, you know, really a, you know, what you would want to see at a university, we want to see this as discovery and experimenting, and a chance, if you're going to fail, let's fail quickly and relatively cheaply, to experience what goes on here. And rather than having academic debates about whether it's good or bad, or whether it does or doesn't do this, or whether it's ethical or, like let's just, let's get on with giving a try. We've set up these guardrails that I think are reasonable. We have a faculty ethics committee that is reviewing each of the proposals that are coming through, so this is not the IT group that's actually doing this review. We actually have a whole panel of researchers and administrative staff that are reviewing all the proposals as they come in, and we're turning them around. And we're really kind of using the, our hope is to turn this into rolling work, you know, as the opportunities come forward. And what we're hoping, again, is that we will build momentum in a way that is focused in on these North Star commitments, which, you know, focus in on our, you know, on our commitments for student success, but also, you know, obviously, to advance competitive research grants. I just got a great note from one of our faculty colleagues today saying he's just put in a $20 million NSF grant. The work that we're doing with him in, you know, shows, again, investment of the institution in his research program. Again, at ASU, Rhea, just to let you know, like, we have 20 large language models. The one that we're talking about today, about OpenAI and the enterprise version of ChatGPT, is just one of the 20. This call is, all of this call for participation from across the campus is also affording us a very important opportunity to find the right kinds of technologies to support the research program. This faculty member that I referred to, who has just submitted a $20 million grant to, it turns out that the OpenAI opportunity wasn't a really great fit for a lot of technical, technical reasons. But we took the opportunity to help him and his lab out by tying them actually to some terrific high-performance computing that was local, through a local partnership that we have, around which we've opened a series of large language models to support research-intensive, computationally intensive uses of the, of generative AI. So, again, you know, at ASU, it's not only about scale and about mission, it's also our commitment to what we call principled innovation. We're innovating with a purpose in mind, with a responsibility in mind, and in doing that, you know, trying our best to engage the whole campus community.
Rhea Kelly 15:36
Could you tell me a little bit more about any of the initial projects that have been approved? Like you mentioned that English composition class — what's going on in there?
Lev Gonick 15:45
Well, I mean, what's going on in, again, there's, there's a prehistory to this as well, because at ASU, first-year English Comp is a requirement. It's also very large: We have 20,000 students each year who go through the first-year Comp. So figuring out how you actually support the kind of quality exchange had led to the writing center teams, on multiples of our campuses, to look to redesign the way in which that English Composition class is delivered. For the last couple of years, we've been trying to tackle the redesign challenge, because it's such a scaling issue for us. And what we've done is we've been using a number of different techniques that our faculty have designed, our writing center faculty have designed, that focus in on where it makes sense to use the AI, as it were, writing buddy, and where it makes sense to have human in the middle, in that experience. And so that is part of a, as I say, a multi-year effort in that effort. And part of it is, you know, we know that there is a sensibility around helping students understand things that are important, like grammar. But there's also things that are important that go on in these writing composition classes that relate to helping students understand the importance of finding their voice. And what we've done in some of these classes is we've actually used the AI to actually recommend a series of different alternative ways of constructing paragraphs, letting students choose either their original version, and/or using selectively what the AI is recommending, and then using the time in the classroom, with the faculty, with the professor, to actually go, right, why did you choose this particular construction, either borrowed from or supported by AI, or why did you choose to keep your original voice along the way. And in that conversation, that dialogue is really, really important to, again, students understanding the importance of their voice, and to own their voice in that work, and at the same time, not run away from the opportunity to be leveraging the power of the technology to support creative work. And so that is one of the projects that is underway. I just sort of say, Rhea, for those of your listeners who are interested, all of these stories are available at ai.asu.edu. There are literally dozens of these stories. As the projects unfold in the first wave of grants related to OpenAI, many, many of them will be chronicled and shared on that ai.asu.edu website.