Ohio State University professors are skeptical, but hopeful that a new initiative to increase artificial intelligence fluency could help advance usage and understanding of the new technology in education.
The university announced last week it wants all 45,000+ undergraduate students to graduate with a fluency in using artificial intelligence. The university said all students will be required to learn to use A.I. in their coursework beginning with the fall semester.
OSU art professor Chris Coleman said he can get behind teaching students how to use AI, but he said the university will be on the cusp of figuring out whether AI becomes a helpful tool or a creative crutch.
"It's a big group of students to run this experiment with," Coleman said. "But I don't think you can ignore (AI) either. So I appreciate that it's bold and this is gonna be attempted."
Starting with the fall semester, Ohio State plans to embed AI education into the core of every class from computer science to agriculture. Students will also learn the ethics of using the tool.
Ohio State said in a news release last week that beginning with the class of 2029, every Buckeye graduate will be fluent in AI and how it can be responsibly applied to advance their field.
“Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live, work, teach and learn. In the not-so-distant future, every job, in every industry, is going to be impacted in some way by AI,” Ohio State President Walter “Ted” Carter Jr. said in a statement.
Carter said Ohio State has an opportunity and responsibility to prepare students to keep up and lead the way in how AI impacts the workforce of the future.
“I’m so pleased that we are taking this bold step forward to set our students up for success and keep Ohio competitive for the long term. We have a strong foundation on which to build, and the AI Fluency initiative will only accelerate our momentum in mission-driven AI research and education," Carter said.
When it comes to art education, Coleman said students could use AI to help inspire physical art forms like sculpting and painting. When it comes to digital work like animation or computer coding, AI potentially could be used to do all the work, creating ethical concerns.
"We're quickly trying to figure out things like if it is still worth rendering frame-by-frame ultra real animation, or are we at the point where we can actually just sort of mock up the animation, plug that footage that quickly rendered footage into AI and get better results and actually save energy," Coleman said.
Coleman said he will be teaching a general AI arts class that he said will get people to think more creatively about using AI for art beyond just telling AI like ChatGPT to make a picture.
"What does it look like if you feed it the lyrics to a song, it turns that into an image. That image then re-inspires a new song, and then that song actually becomes food for another model which generates video," Coleman said. "I think there's some really interesting processes that can be built."
Coleman said he is concerned about how this technology may take away jobs. He pointed out when computers were first invented, jobs that were once done by mathematicians were taken over by computers.
Coleman gave the example of the women who helped run complex mathematical equations for NASA.
"For me, the most important thing is that students understand where AI comes from, how it works and how to make smart decisions about whether or not to use it for everything that they're doing in life," Coleman said. "That's the kind of literacy that I can get behind is being knowledgeable enough to make an intelligent choice about using AI."
Elizabeth Hewitt, chair of Ohio State's English department, said she likes to use the comparison of AI in academics to the debate over the calculator for math decades ago. Like the calculator, she said some view AI as a tool that can be used to help students improve and innovate their work.
Hewitt said professors discovered in 2022 that more students were using AI to help write their papers either partially or entirely. She said this led to an increase in complaints to Ohio State's Committee on Academic Misconduct.
Hewitt said at the time, AI was "hallucinating" or putting incorrect information and using language in odd ways. Since then, Hewitt has said AI has learned and become more sophisticated and much harder to detect.
"I think with the next generation, the algorithms have gotten better and more sophisticated. And so it's less easy to see. There never really were foolproof ways of detecting AI use in any case," Hewitt said.
Hewitt said in English, she wants students to know how to use it in the most ethical, responsible and productive way possible without using AI to do all their work for them.
Hewitt said she is skeptical of just how much AI will ultimately be able to replace the foundational knowledge taught in coursework for subjects like English and art.
"I do think that a lot of the (AI) advocates, the true believers, the people who are also going to make substantial amounts of money from it, they make it sound like this will be our new world in which that kind of knowledge isn't requisite. I have a hard time understanding what that will look like," Hewitt said.
Hewitt said Ohio State wants students to think critically about these hard questions about AI. She said this may determine how far AI usage can go without replacing the need for creativity and human thought.
