There has been a revolution in academic attitudes toward artificial intelligence, and the Darla Moore School of Business is in the vanguard of it.
Until very recently, everyone from junior high school teachers to college professors was terrified of ChatGPT and at a loss for how to keep students from letting it write their essays and term papers.
Not anymore. Educators have realized their students will be living in a world where AI is inescapable. To prepare them for that world, faculty have switched their goals from telling students NOT to use the powerful new algorithms to showing them HOW to use them.
As recently as two years ago, “Professors were worried about cheating: How do I catch it?” says Joel Wooten, an associate professor in the Management Science department of the Moore School. Back then, they saw it as an isolated threat that they could neutralize if they could just find the key.
That changed, very quickly.
“It’s so much a part of the world now,” says Wooten. “The discussions around AI have evolved so much in such a short time.”
Two years ago, Rohit Verma became dean of the Moore School and formed several task forces related to important issues the school faced. One of them was focused on how to approach AI going forward. That ad hoc group is now a permanent committee, focused not on opposing a threat, but on identifying the many ways the school can embrace and employ an opportunity that touches on everything we do today.
“The committee decided that cheating was not what we should be concerned about; we need to prepare people for a world with AI,” says Wooten. The goal became to graduate students “with knowledge of how to use it; to make it utilitarian.”
The Moore School started injecting AI instruction across the curriculum. New classes were created, while AI was inserted into a variety of existing courses.
The atmosphere became one of “daring experimentation.” For instance, Wooten read one morning about a new AI platform called Lovable. He tried it out for the first time that day – in front of a class. Then he assigned the students to use it immediately to build something new. “Every class since then, we have built something with that platform.”
The applications are legion – marketing, creating video, visuals, text, operations involving languages and computer code. Don’t like the search engine you’re using? You can build your own.
“The appetite for AI is so strong right now,” he says. And it’s not just about full-time students. Faculty are being approached by alumni who are encountering AI everywhere and want to learn how to ride this new wave.
Once they learn about it, “people go out and use it immediately,” he says. The questions from the business world are no longer “How do I think about it?” Now it’s more like, “Let’s jump in and do it.”
The revolution is here and ongoing.
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