In this episode of Speaking Of... Tom Cunneff, College of Charleston Magazine editor talks to Navid Hashemi and Sarah Schoemann, computer science professors about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT and what this means to higher education.
"It's revolutionary," says Hashemi who compares the development in technology to the Industrial Revolution. "In the industrial revolution, we tried to replace our muscles with robots or tools. But here, the systems are trying to help our brain to make better decisions and somehow make our life easier. If the paradigm shift is exponential in the next in the next few years, I believe that we are going to see a lot of new advancements in many different fields, in drug discovery, in music, in art, in robots, social living, driving and self driving."
One of the biggest questions and hottest debates is how these large language models will change higher education and whether educators should embrace or ban AI from classrooms. "I think it's a technology that you really need a nuanced approach to," says Schoemann. "Ultimately, the idea of banning it outright will fail because students are savvy, and trying to ban any technology from students is never really the right move. But I'm not sure that it needs to become the center of the classroom."
Featured on this Episode:
Sarah Schoemann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, she received her PhD from GA Tech in 2021. At College of Charleston she is the director of the Critical Art and Technology Lab or CATLab. She primarily teaches courses in the CS department's Computing in the Arts or "CITA" program, which combines the study of the arts with computation. Trained as both a fine artist and a researcher in the field of Human Computer Interaction and Game Studies she is focused on the design and evaluation of new technologies such as games and interactive experiences with a focus on how creativity, and playfulness can have real-world impacts. She is particularly interest in the implications of technologies for critically engaging with broader social questions regarding justice, equity and inclusion.
Navid Hashemi is the director of the graduate program in Data Science and Analytics at the College of Charleston. He joined the Computer Science department in 2020 as an assistant professor and founded the Data Mining and Connectivity (DMC) research lab. He is an active researcher in spatiotemporal data mining, machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT) analytics, and crowd-sensing. Hashemi holds a doctorate in computer science from the University of Georgia, and prior to joining the college, he held a visiting faculty position at Emory University.
Resources from this Episode:
AI expert Timnit Gebru talks to 60 minutes about bias in large language models like ChatGPT
Article about Getty Images lawsuit against Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement
Refik Anadol, artist who uses AI to create wall-sized generative art, using only “ethically sourced data” as training data.
Official chatGPT/GPT-4 webpages:
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt
https://openai.com/research/gpt-4