GenAI and our research futures
As I’m prepping syllabi for the upcoming semester, I’ve been thinking a lot about generative AI (GenAI). While I’ve only starting using it often recently, I know our students have been using it to clean up writing, complete literature searches, compose emails, and maybe (sometimes) writing up entire assignments. This hadn’t really been bothering me, but my perspective has evolved some recently.
Consider the student who is suing her university because she found a faculty member had used GenAI to create their slide-decks, leading the student to ask, “What had they actually been paying tuition for?” Students are using AI in similarly problematic ways to offload important brain work. Finally, a recent article showed consistent use of GenAI actually hampers a person’s capacity to think critically.
None of this is necessarily surprising, human beings, as energy conserving creatures at baseline, and tend to go all in on new ideas, opportunities, and technologies that seem to make life easier. But when I think about these new data, coupled with the dual role of universities to educate students and advance knowledge, and another piece I read recently about our increasingly frictionless world, I realized my approach had to change.
In this piece the author, Kyla Scanlon, starts with a little story about a flight delay she experienced due to one of the shutdowns at the Newark airport earlier this spring. She then goes onto to discuss the idea of “friction” across the digital world (where there’s little to no friction), the physical world (where there’s lots of friction), and in curated spaces (where you can pay to remove friction). The main idea I took from this piece is that as we have removed friction from our lives via digitalization and the privilege of being about to pay to remove any remaining friction we don’t want, we’ve fundamentally neglected the physical world where we actually exist. I understand why. We are busier than we have ever been, the world is heavy (and getting heavier), and frankly friction is annoying.
But as Scanlon points out the digital, physical, and curated worlds all feed off each other. GenAI demands power to work, if our physical infrastructure can’t keep up those billions in investment won’t matter. If our road and bridges crumble, we can’t move products around the country or get to work. If we don’t keep up the people and systems that move us safely through the air more delays and potential tragedy won’t be far behind.
So, what does this mean from my thinking about GenAI? I still believe that it has the potential to be incredibly helpful to our world. But that helpfulness is contingent on our willingness to engage in some heavy lifting in the physical world (hello friction 👋). There are so many unknowns (and unknowable) about what, how, and why GenAI can be used (meaning serious research opportunities in EVERY field). Our students need to build muscles in critical thinking, and faculty will have to help hold them accountable to do that (welcome back Blue Books?). Here’s what I’m going to do to do to increase friction in my research and teaching:
1. I am going to embrace this new technology for its potential, because pretending it doesn’t exist, or using it on the sly, isn’t going to solve our problems.
2. I am going grapple with and investigate both the intended and unintended impacts GenAI will have for my community partners.
3. I am going to have intentional conversations with students about the use of this technology to show them how I’m using it and invite them to work alongside me in figuring out how and where we can use it for benefit.
At the end of the day GenAI is here and it’s not going anywhere, so what can be done right now to give ourselves the best opportunity to benefit, innovate new solutions, and minimize the harm it could cause. How are you thinking about and approaching GenAI?
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