Feeling overwhelmed by AI? We get it.

Recently Ethan Mollick published an excellent rundown of common questions about AI in higher education. I strongly recommend reading the entire piece for smart takes on AI detection software (spoiler: it does not work), the lack of adequate instruction from producing companies, and a number of other issues. One line stood out to me in the conclusion, “the only thing I know for sure is that the AI you are using today is the worst AI you are ever going to use, since we are in for at least one major round of AI advances, and likely many more.” Of course he is correct that new models are on the horizon including Google Gemini. On a personal note I just got access to GPT-Vision which allows ChatGPT to analyze images and it is amazing. 

I’m not looking longingly at the next shiny object (okay, maybe a little) instead I want to say the quiet part for academics out loud: This is moving too fast to keep up and we are overwhelmed. Barely six months ago Nik and I were giving our first webinars about ChatGPT which at that time had a dataset frozen from September 2021 and a common response was “I’ll just ask my students about current events.” Of course, now this seems a naive and quaint response–but six months ago that seemed reasonable. Once I had a manuscript under review for two years, six months is the blink of an eye for academics. At our home institution of Chico State it has always seemed like the pace of change is too slow, but at this moment no amount of institutional agility seems sufficient. 

Next week we are delivering a presentation for ADEIL (it’s going to be lit) which you are welcome to attend online. The point of the presentation is to highlight the disruptions to higher education institutions and the preferred pace of change at those institutions, especially those with strong shared governance. I won’t spoil the presentation here, but suffice it to say there are many highlights of this mis-match. 

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I vacillate between excitement and a sense of dread about AI. But my dread isn’t like the world-ending terror felt by others, it is much more local. We have devoted our professional lives to the teacher-scholar model of education and the related idea that deliberate systematic approaches to education are best–can those ideas persist in a world of rapid and accelerating change? Right now I don’t know.

There are ongoing developments we highlight on our blog. We also recommend the blog of Ethan Mollick. We look forward to hearing from and working with you as these developments unfold.