This image has been created with the assistance of AI, using DALL-E.
Students, profs encouraged to embrace the future and learn nuances of this new technology
By Jim Prime (’69)
In Acadia's hallowed halls, where wisdom's light does shine,
There stirs a whisper of progress, a vision quite divine.
Through corridors of knowledge, where minds in quest do roam,
AI's embrace shall guide them, to futures yet unknown. In years to come, as time unfolds its secrets bold,
AI shall weave its wonders, in Acadia's stronghold.
No more shall learning languish, in static books confined,
For AI shall breathe new life, to each inquiring mind.
-Chat GPT3.5
This poem was composed instantaneously by an artificial intelligence tool called CHAT GPT in response to my command to “describe, in the style of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline, how AI will have impacted education at Acadia by 2038, the 200th anniversary of the school.” It may fall short of Longfellow’s lyricism and its emotional impact may be negligible, but hopefully it piqued your interest enough that you want to learn more about AI. And that’s really the point. AI is a burgeoning phenomenon that promises to revolutionize many aspects of our lives, including education. It’s the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. Acadia is embracing the technology, with several faculty and staff at the forefront of the innovation and change.
Dr. Danny Silver (’79)
Dr. Danny Silver (’79), Acadia professor and former Director of the Jodrey School of Computer Science, sees AI as a natural progression of technology in education, part of the sequence from slide rule to calculator to desktop to laptop to smart phone. “The impact is going to be similar,” Silver says. “Certain parts of what we once had to remember have faded away. Once you had a slide rule, there were certain rules of thumb that you didn’t have to worry about anymore. Once you had a calculator, you didn’t have to remember the times table or how to compute factorial or the square root of a number. Most people would agree that it’s a waste of time when you can just pull out your phone or do it on your laptop. The same is true of AI. Students in computer science at Acadia are already writing programs using AI, including for their assignments. “The biggest challenge we face is to introduce AI to students. The one that has caught everyone’s imagination is generative AI. Tell Chat GPT, ‘I’d like to have a paragraph on cats’ and the bot starts generating it ‘automagically,’ as I call it. In actual fact, it regurgitates the statistics of words that follow one after another. You can use it to generate a poem or a program. “What you might see is that AI systems will provide wonderful 24-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year tutors. They’re something that a student can turn to any day or night and ask, ‘Did I do that right?’ or ‘What would be the best thing to do here?’ They wouldn’t have had this option before, other than to look it up in the old World Book Encyclopedia. Of course, it comes with the caveat that you still have to use the human brain to make sure it makes sense.” AI technology will also hold advantages for busy Acadia profs, allowing more time for student-teacher interaction. Bots will enable educators to customize questions to a specific audience. If they are teaching algebra to students with a love of music, they can request a music example. If they are sports-minded, you can get a sports example. It enables teachers to engage students in a more personal way. A possible downside is that these useful teaching aids can also be accessed by students and some fear that job losses might result. “It’s the Yin and the Yang,” Silver says.
“I don’t think we’re going to find that it has too much of an impact on jobs. It’s going to become another tool, but increasingly teachers will have to stay current with those methods. If you’re teaching physics, for example, you have to teach the students to use certain aspects of the computer to do calculations that they would have worked out on paper before.”
Dr. Danny Silver ('79)
Learning how to learn
Universities are about learning how to learn, he says. “If you graduate from university, you know you’ll spend the rest of your life learning. If you stop learning you probably don’t need the degree and it wouldn’t do much good anyway. You have to be tough on students to let them know they have remember how to do it, while also knowing how to do it yourself. It’s increasingly a moving target if you look at that continuum from slide rule to calculator to computer or phone to AI.
“The greatest current concern about AI is misuse by humans, either maliciously or carelessly. That can fall into the educational setting via biases that we either purposely put in or that are just oversights. For example, traditionally within Nova Scotia history, Acadian, Indigenous, and Black history hasn’t been well covered. It’s usually not premeditated, but is deemed by AI not to be culturally important. We’re seeing that these AI systems usually train with a certain corpus of information that only produces generative results around those things.” A recent survey of North American universities showed that of the respondents, 50 per cent of them, mostly in the U.S., have outlawed AI. Students and teachers are not allowed to use it. Acadia is not among them. “The vast majority of people are saying that outlawing the technology is entirely the wrong way to approach it. That’s a good sign given that it will impact students’ and teachers’ lives in general. It’s here, like nuclear power, and it’s not going to go away, so we have to embrace it and discover the things to keep at the human level. The real losers in this, and there will be losers, are those universities that say, ‘We don’t want anything to do with this AI. It’s invasive of the human experience.’ You know what’s going to happen there? Graduates from those schools are eventually going to go to work and the employers are going to tell them they don’t need to spend three days on a project, just use Chat GPT. And the employees will say, ‘sorry, we didn’t learn that in university.’”
Enthusiastic proponent
Acadia psychology professor Dr. Daniel Lametti uses AI in his classrooms and is an enthusiastic proponent. He recently authored an article for SLATE magazine refuting the claim that it will signal the “death of the essay.” His conclusion? “AI like ChatGPT won’t replace flesh and blood writers.” As a cognitive psychologist, Lametti is highly qualified to compare AI’s potential to that of the human mind. “Like AI, we are really good at learning association in language and these associations allow us to make very quick decisions and think very quickly using language. For example, you don’t have to think about my words as I speak; you just kind of understand them. Similarly, with reading, you can just look at words and understand them. So these AIs produce language by learning statistical regularities of the language – effectively what word comes next based on the words that came before – but unlike a human, they can’t reason, they can’t think logically, they can’t fact-check. They don’t really know anything at all.” The role of teachers will be to ensure that students know the nature of AI; that bots don’t know the difference between factually correct and factually incorrect. A student trying to use it to generate text needs to know that the text produced will be typically vague, off topic, riddled with mistakes or even made up. “It has to be heavily edited and backchecked,” Lametti cautions. “They have to use it like a tool: a starting point, not the finished product. You can use it to generate new ideas or present different viewpoints so it actually has the potential to be good for creativity, but using it to create something that doesn’t go through the human eye is a bad use of AI. Empathy would be lacking because it requires a knowledge of the working of the human mind and how other people think and feel, and these AIs certainly don’t have that.” Lametti has seen a lot of his students using AI quite creatively, as a study companion, for instance, to generate practice problems or to edit text that they’ve written. In his view, that’s a great use of this technology, a benefit to education. “Most Acadia students are fairly tech-savvy these days and they’re quick to incorporate technology into their schoolwork,” Lametti says. “I think what we need to do a better job of as educators is simply instructing students on how this technology works, what it’s good for and what it doesn’t do well, and how it should be used. As educators we’re all trying to figure out how best to incorporate AI into our work. Again, the starting point is figuring out how it works.” We hear about cases of AI misuse every day in the news, in politics, business and education. It’s natural that teachers and professors would view it with a level of mistrust. “The initial response from many academics was one of fear, thinking here’s this tool that can generate text on a topic and do it effortlessly. I do think it’s very short-sighted to just ban the technology,” Lametti notes. “What we should be concentrating on as educational institutions is educating: educating students as to how this technology works and how it should or shouldn’t be used because the workers of the future are going to have to know how to use this tool to be successful. I think you’d be doing your students a disservice by not letting them engage with it.” Acadia prides itself on its small class sizes and easy access to support from professors. Will AI destroy that intimate relationship? And is it a good fit for the University?
Dr. Daniel Lametti
This image has been created with the assistance of AI, using Freepik Pikaso.
Acadia traditions won’t change
“It’s a good fit for Acadia because in a smaller school you are much more likely to use this tool with a professor who knows it and can show how it works. That’s a central benefit,” Lametti says. “I’ve gone through a huge amount of technological change in my career since I started university. In 2001 the Internet was just starting to become a thing on university campuses. A lot has changed since then, but a lot has stayed the same. I give lectures that are very similar to the lectures that I had as a student. “The university as a model, and especially Acadia’s model – small school, small class sizes, interactions with professors – is such a good way of learning. I don’t really see it changing. Small schools like Acadia are so much better positioned to interact with students, to use this technology in a positive and productive way.” Tavis Bragg (’14) is a high school teacher by day and an instructor of generative AI and computers in society at Acadia. His perspective is informed by both jobs, and his enthusiasm for AI and its potential is contagious. His vision of the future includes a possible move toward new ways of assessing learning. “I think what you’re going to see in the universities is a dramatic change in lecture format,” Bragg says. “We may see a move away from paper-based assessments like writing an essay and submitting it for an ultimate assessment of your knowledge. We may see a push to the dissertation level. Students will be asked to present their work in a way that is verbalized and defended as a demonstration of their knowledge, as opposed to leaning on a generative AI system that has created the paper based on their own samples of writing that sounds just like them, but is actually a very convincing kind of Doppelganger writer. “The other possibility is that we may continue to see the same format of assessment that we always had at university, but we will begin to train our professors with generative AI so that they can identify AI writing very quickly. There are go-to most predictive terms like ‘delve’ and ‘tapestry’ and these are algorithmic machines. They are not thinking things. They are just trying to give you the best possible prediction based on the information that they have. Professors can then instantly recognize when something is plagiarized or written by an AI system.”
Tavis Bragg (’14)
Is AI a threat to teachers?
“Teachers should embrace AI because it creates a more robust education,” Bragg says. “I’m teaching Canadian history at high school during the days. It’s not my specialization, but it is one of the courses that I’m required to teach. Years before I would have had to go and find somebody else’s work and I would have had to read it and reuse their assignments or make my own from scratch, which would be a long, detailed learning process. What I’d do today is take on a generative AI that I subscribe to – like Open AI Chat GPT 4 – and go through an iterative process back and forth to get feedback and learning and conversation and then create a syllabus which leads to the production of my year-long plan and then to my weekly planning and units, right down to my days and the assignment that I’m creating. “Students in all subject areas will be helped by this. I teach computer science and sociology and philosophy, and they are all equally benefitting. AI can now write code, they can have enhanced conversations, take on the role of a philosopher or act as a very specific kind of artist or author. It allows you to see different perspectives regardless of the discipline. “They aren’t truly creative yet; they are parroting the most predictive and best things based on the input you gave them so what you are specifically asking for is what you’re going to get. There’s the old concept in coding that applies very well here: garbage in, garbage out. If you’re going to get bad prompts, you’ll get bad output. If you ask the system to write an essay on Macbeth, it will say okay and write an essay on Macbeth using all the cues, all the knowledge it possesses, and create the most predictable, boring paper that says nothing about what your professor might have asked because it wasn’t pre-trained on the criteria and outcomes and all the conversations and lectures that would have needed to take place to best write that paper. The creative component is really the iterative back and forth with the AI conversation that takes place with the student and the AI, so the creativity is still very human.” Another advantage of AI is that it lends itself very well to individualizing learning. “I’m using it for that every day in my classes,” Bragg adds. “I have students from Syria that speak Arabic as their first language and are learning English as a second language. I can create a document that’s in English. I can have it translated to Arabic so they can access that information. I can have AI rewrite it in a simplified English format for the ESL students. Student engagement is improved.” AI may still be in its infancy, but there’s no doubt that it’s a precocious and gifted child with immense potential. And like any precocious child, it will require human guidance, understanding, and wisdom to reach that potential. Acadia is ready to accept the challenge and grasp the opportunities. There are exciting times ahead on the Wolfville campus in the Land of Evangeline.