Are You a Good Person? 10 Questions to Consider

In this episode, Craig has a mini-rant about misleading click-bait headlines, discusses two recent generative AI surveys, gives the rundown on Google's rebrand from Brard to Gemini and Perplexity.ai and shares a modest experiment in redesigning an assignment to prevent generative AI academic dishonesty (which is a fancy way to say cheating).

More details are available at https://www.aigoestocollege.com/p/newsletter/, where you can subscribe to the AI Goes to College newsletter.

Contact Craig at https://www.aigoestocollege.com/ or [email protected]

--- Transcript ---

Craig [00:00:10]: Welcome to episode number 2 of AI Goes to College, the podcast that helps higher ed professionals try to figure out what's going on with generative AI. I'm your host, doctor Craig Van Slyke. So this week, I give you a mini rant. It's not a full rant, but a mini rant about misleading headlines, Talk about Google's release of a new model and its big rebrand from Bard to Gemini. My favorite part is gonna be when I talk about dot AI, which is generating a lot of interest right now, and I think it's tailor made for higher ed, even though I don't think that they're restricting the audience to higher ed and some promising results from a little experiment I did in redesigning an assignment. I'm gonna hit the highlights in this episode of the podcast. But if you want the full details, go to AI goes to college.com And click on the newsletter link and subscribe to my newsletter. A lot more details, screenshots, that sort of thing there.

Craig [00:01:09]: So here's my rant. Cengage, and if you're in higher ed, you know who Cengage is. They call themselves course material publishers, Just released its 2023 digital learning pulse survey. As far as I can tell, this is the 1st time the survey gathered data about AI. The results are pretty interesting. It says only 23% of faculty at 4 year schools thought that their institutions were prepared for AI related changes, and that number was only 16% for 2 year schools faculty at 2 year schools. 41% of faculty across the 2 different types of institutions thought that generative AI would bring considerable or massive amounts to change to their institutions. What bothers me about this survey, is really not the survey itself, But how it's being reported? So the headline of the article from which I kind of learned about this survey read, Survey reveals only 16% of faculty is ready for Gen AI in higher ed, which is not at all what the survey was about.

Craig [00:02:22]: The survey, at least the part of it I'm talking about, asked 2 generative AI related questions. Do you think your institution is is prepared for AI related changes. And how much will AI tools change your institution over the next 5 years? So first of all, that really isn't specific to generative AI, although I think that's what most people would interpret, AI as. The title of the article that led me to the survey said that faculty aren't ready. Well, that's not what the survey asked about. It didn't ask if the faculty were ready, although that would have been a good thing to ask. It asked if they thought their institutions were ready. So I want to caution all of you to do something you already know you should be doing.

Craig [00:03:09]: Read these click headlines, and there are a lot of them. Read the articles with a critical eye. If it's something that's important, if it's something that you're going to try to rely on To make any sort of a decision or to form your attitudes, take the time to look at the underlying data. Don't just look at how that particular author is putting the data. Look at the data yourself. All of that being said, I think we're probably not especially well prepared collectively for generative AI, And that's not a big surprise. It's still relatively new, and it's changing very rapidly. So we'll see.

Craig [00:03:48]: Speaking of changes, Google Bard is now Google Gemini, and it's not just a rebrand. So Google also, as part of the rebrand, announced that they have some new models. So with Gemini, formerly Bard, which you can find at gemini.google.com. There are 2 versions at the moment, Gemini and Gemini advanced, and this is kind of the same as Chat GPT and Chat GPT Pro. The nomenclature is a little bit confusing. Gemini is a family of models. Ultra is the big dog high performance model. Pro is kind of the regular model, and Nano is a light version optimized for efficiency, which I think signals that Google is gonna make a push into AI on mobile devices.

Craig [00:04:36]: I was pretty confused about the names and what models there were and that sort of thing. So I asked Gemini to explain it to me. The details of that conversation are in the newsletter, which is available at AI goes to college .c...