ChatGPT Can Get Off My Lawn. Higher ed is making far too much of “artificial intelligence.”

Will artificial intelligence become the greatest boon to higher education since online learning? (This assumes that online learning was a boon, which is a topic for another day.) Or will it mean the utter destruction of academia as we know it? Those are the two views I see expressed most frequently these days, with various individuals I respect taking opposite sides.

As someone who is naturally skeptical of this kind of over-the-top rhetoric, I believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Despite the forceful yet mixed messages surrounding AI and its applications to higher ed, I have so far in my work been affected by it very little. Although I could be wrong, I don’t expect to be much affected by it in the future.

So: Should I change the way I do everything to accommodate this latest “latest thing”? Or should I run for the hills and pray for the mountains to fall on me? Perhaps I should do neither, confident that the more attention a new toy receives, the less it probably deserves.

The suddenness with which AI arrived on campus last winter, in the form of ChatGPT, and the speed with which it became, overnight, all anyone was talking about, are reminiscent of other much-ballyhooed events of the not-too-distant past. Remember Y2K? Our computers would all stop working. Airplanes would fall from the sky. Civilization would be thrust back into the Stone Age. Yet, as I strongly suspected would be the case, none of that happened. It turned out to be a big “nothingburger,” as they say.

I have a couple of thoughts and maybe somebody can help me.

First, I think AI is simply an advanced way of data mining. Perhaps because it has a new label, there is some expectation of marketability and that’s why you see its recent popularity.

Second, it seems like the term has caught fire in, various markets, and everybody is trying to apply the label to make themselves look novel.

I’ll accept any criticism of this POV,

Educate me.

I work in healthcare and have been exposed to and use practically both AI and Machine Learning (both of which are being used two things which are used somewhat interchangeably, but are different. (If you are interested in how it can be used constructively, I can expand on my experience)

AI isn’t data mining, although it (and machine learning) can absolutely (and are) be used for data mining. For example, the proliferation of digital data in Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) could be mined using these technologies in tandem to find links between things that are beyond the ken of human perception to see. Because our medical data is now more digital (with ALL the good AND BAD things that go along with it) instead of physically written, it lends itself to this type of analysis. I am making this up, but using these tools could discover a link between the age of onset of nearsightedness and a susceptibility to kidney stones. Point is, no human is likely to ever look for a relationship between nearsightedness and kidney stones, but machines with AI and Machine Learning whose main requirement is a sufficient amount of data to examine, would see it where no human would.

I do believe there is some truth in your comment about “applying a label to make themselves look novel”.

AI uses algorithms to mimic the human cognitive process, and machine learning uses the analysis of data to find patterns, and automatically incorporates it to improve the ability to analyze the data.

Both can be quite powerful and useful.

And quite dangerous.

I view these tools in the understanding that most things have a duality to them. They can be used for good or evil, in the same way a simple claw hammer could be used to build a beautiful coffee table, or to bash someone’s brains in and murder them.

And I no longer trust mankind to use tools like these responsibly and constructively. While it is true that in the case of AI and Machine Learning there may be many beneficial things that will come from it, in the hands of Communist China, a non-Constitutionally guided US Government, Google, and any number of other bad actors, it has the potential to be extraordinarily destructive to both our liberties and our lives.

And indications are, it is full recognized by those entities for its potential for abuse, and is being tirelessly exploited for these nefarious purposes.

God help us.

I understand.

My field is GIS and my experience is similar to yours. We would look for relationships between various spatial phenomena, exploring the possibilities of cause and effect relationships between them.

What you describe sounds similar to that science except that with the power of modern data processing, far more databases can be compared automatically in far less time and the new information (results) might become evident that might never (?) have been considered possible.

It still looks like “data mining” to me - on steroids.

We were toying around with neural networks and data marts 20 years ago. AI sounds like a steps ahead of those two efforts.

Thank you for your reply to me. I really appreciate it.

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