Will artificial intelligence push creativity aside? Or does its arrival place a premium on the lived human experience and what that brings to work and creative arts? Those are the questions confronting professors across the country and at two of Virginia’s top research universities.
For Matthew Vollmer of Virginia Tech, writing is still done the old-fashioned way – with pen and plenty of paper. However, that’s where the work begins. Vollmer will then turn to AI to transcribe his handwritten pages, identify patterns in his work, or make suggestions about what to read on the fictional topic he is writing about. While Vollmer admits AI can write some sparkling prose that can entrance a reader, that awe fades quickly. “To write compelling fiction,” he told Virginia Tech News, “you need not only to have read and processed information, but you need to live, to have lived.” This fall Vollmer will be introducing older adults to this approach as part of the university’s Lifelong Learning Institute. “I especially love older adults who are humble enough to keep asking hard questions,” he said, “and who understand that as long as they are alive, they have more to learn.”
At the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, AI is taking its place in the “case method” of teaching. This approach requires students to read a case, explore ideas with other students, and then attend class prepared to say what the protagonist should do. Now, AI is being introduced to the mix. According to the dean of the school, however, it’s no shortcut in learning. “People often ‘over-index on tools and techniques’ and underweight decision-making and the ability to lead through ambiguity,” Dean Yael Grushka-Cockayne said to alumni in a virtual conversation. “A Darden student still has to frame the problem, judge the evidence, listen to dissent and own a decision,” according to the story in The Darden Report. “The machine can enter the preparation. It cannot take the student’s seat in the room.”
Not every school is reaching the same conclusions, however. At the University of Chicago, the Social Science Core Classes will no longer allow the use of AI or most technologies in class. Instead, the sequence of courses will be taught as “analog” courses. The reason, according to a memo written by SSCD Master Jenny Trinitapoli, is that “[I]n the SOSC Core we first equip students to read, write, and think without dependence on AI, just as we equip students to read, write, and think beyond the bounds of conventional views or leading ideologies.”
The struggle in education over how to handle AI is real. Later this week, VFP will have a report on how AI is playing out in K12 classes and schools across the commonwealth. Watch for it.
That technology is changing Virginians’ lives and work is a given. But how? Daily Tech Notes examines the new ventures, educational opportunities, and public ways companies and individuals are leveraging technology to write the commonwealth’s future.
