Facing the Fear of AI

Last year, when Dr. Lori Sefton thought about what artificial intelligence might mean to college education, she was worried. A Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Applied Agriculture, Sefton teaches Oral Communication, and her knee jerk reaction to AI assistants like ChatGPT was to keep them out of the classroom and away from education.

Then she took a number of classes in large language models, the AI technology behind ChatGPT and other bots like Microsoft’s Co-pilot and Google’s Gemini. Now she’s a convert who not only lets her students use AI, but actively encourages it.

“When I started the journey last summer, I was in “afraid” mode,” Sefton said. “I was thinking, how do I control this? How do I stop my students from using it to cheat, and how will they learn anything if they rely on AI? But after learning more about it, I have really come to a place where I want to embrace it, and I want to prepare my students to use it effectively in their careers.”

Sefton signed up for a few sessions at UMD’s Teaching & Learning Transformation Center (TLTC) and a couple of outside classes in how to teach with AI, and this spring semester, she fearlessly dove in. In the third week of her class, after already going over the basic components of developing an effective oral presentation, Sefton invited her students to pair up and log onto TerpAI, the UMD-owned chatbot powered by the company OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.

Then she walked them through a series of prompts to encourage TerpAI to produce all the proper elements of an introduction speech. Students read the computer’s output aloud as they went along, with some sounding pretty good, and others missing the mark. Throughout the session, Sefton was fond of repeating the phrase “Computers don’t have a brain, so you have to tell it what you want.”

That telling seems to be the key to successfully incorporating AI in this type of class. Sefton explains that students can’t get decent results from an AI if they don’t understand what they’re looking for. They have to know what makes a good presentation in order to evaluate what AI spits out, to know what’s missing, or what’s off, and they need to know how to coach an AI tool into filling in the blanks and including all the important elements.

“My goal is to help them think about how to use AI critically as a tool or an assistant, rather than just something to do the work for them,” Sefton said.

After all, that’s the way they will be using AI in their future careers, so to Sefton, preparing them for success means facing that reality. AI is not going away. When Chat GPT was released in November, 2022, it took just five days for one million people to give it a go, sparking both excitement and hand wringing over the benefits and risks of AI, especially in education.

Among those who worried it would only encourage cheating and prevent students from learning, the arguments were similar to those that accompanied the controversial introduction of the handheld electronic calculator, which quickly replaced long division and slide rules in the 1970s. Today, it’s hard to imagine balancing a household budget without a calculator, and it’s no stretch to imagine the ubiquitous use of AI chatbots in the very near future.

At AGNR, Sefton is not alone in her enthusiasm to embrace the new tools. Professor of Environmental Science and Technology, Dave Tilley, has been exploring the benefits of AI for his students since ChatGPT was first released, and he teaches a course on AI use in environmental entrepreneurship. The TLTC has run a few AI workshops specifically for AGNR faculty according to Mona Thompson, TLTC development specialist, who helps faculty become familiar with the tools.

“There will be different types of courses where [AI in the classroom] is more or less applicable and different contexts where it makes sense to steer students towards or away from AI,”  Thompson said. “I think it is growing as instructors gain familiarity with it and have more approved tools to play around with and use with their students.”

For Sefton, who is determined to face the future her students will be graduating into, there is no going back.