The Committee on the Responsible Use of ArtificiaI Intelligence (AI) at Illinois State University is launching a new initiative to explore the impact of AI at Illinois State. The AI Brown Bag Series will provide a platform for faculty and staff to engage in how AI is being used on campus across a number of units and discuss AI’s role in research and teaching.
As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated in everyday technologies, the series aims to share opportunities and challenges encountered through research and teaching experiences. We are seeing generative AI advances regularly, yet the historical adoptions of new technologies have often had similar trends in their impacts. Work by Dr. Emily Bender, et al. (“On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?”) notes that larger datasets does not necessarily mean they are more diverse.
There are increased concerns about equity, diversity, inclusion, and access to these technologies, along with their environmental impacts, as stated in Drs. Abeda Birhane and Vinay Uday Prabhu’s words (inspired by Ruha Benjamin): “Feeding AI systems on the world’s beauty, ugliness, and cruelty, but expecting it to reflect only the beauty is a fantasy.” Yet, we should consider our teaching and research time and effort a valuable resource, and a human connection, and keeping “human in the loop” as important ways to continue working alongside new technologies that can support certain efficiencies. The integration of AI into our workflows to engage in brainstorming, iteration, and creating variations within constraints can, for example, help with “dirtying the page” to support the beginning of a task.
These informal sessions will create space for discussing ethical considerations, sharing experiences with AI implementation across different contexts, and developing strategies for understanding, evaluating, and implementing AI tools on the Illinois State campus.
The inaugural session will feature presentations by two faculty members: Dr. Nariman Ammar, assistant professor of computer science, specializing in health informatics, knowledge representation, and AI; and Dr. Mikyung Shin, assistant professor of special education, specializing in mathematics, special education, technology, meta-analysis, and artificial intelligence.
Their presentations will be followed by an open discussion on AI applications in research and teaching.
The first meeting will be held Friday, November 15, from noon to 1 p.m. in Williams Room 307. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunch to the session. There will also be a Zoom option.
For additional information about the AI Brown Bag Series, you may visit the AI at ISU and the Provost Office for more information about each session.
Please contact Kristin Carlson (kacarl1@IllinoisState.edu) with any questions or inquiries.
