University of Kwazulu-Natal

Marc Watkins Substack

Bonisiwe Shabane
-
marc watkins substack

Navigating how AI impacts education, culture, and society. I helped found the Mississippi AI Institute for Teachers because generative AI is unavoidable in our classrooms. I regularly write about AI on Substack and in a column at The Chronicle of Higher Education. How we talk about AI in education must change. Like so many things in our world, our well-intentioned efforts to solve one problem usher in a legion of new challenges, and AI detection is no different. Recently, process tracking joined the pantheon of AI detection techniques.

We’ve seen the rush to adopt AI-powered detectors, experiments with linguistic finger-printing, watermarking AI outputs through cryptography, and now an advanced form of long-term proctoring called process tracking. The ground truth is faculty are turning to AI detection because they are burning out. They can’t keep up with all the ways AI can impact writing or do assignments for students. They’re resorting to imperfect tools to track and detect, while others are using the physical classroom space to do device-free and reclaim some time for learning without technology. I have written and rewritten this post perhaps a dozen times. It’s spring break for my kids, so we made our way down to New Orleans for a few nights.

My wife told me to relax and not do any work, so I did my best to stay offline. This of course didn’t happen like I’d planned. For this essay, I’d write a paragraph or two, maybe even some of them were rants, and delete them. The kids run past. We’d go out for five or six hours, and come back for a rest. I’d start again.

I’d take a sentence I’d written for this piece and save it into my notes for a presentation or future talk, copy a link to another writer’s article, and maybe even use AI to... Read it after a few hours, decide I didn’t like it, and then go about and delete it. If an editor saw my writing process they’d think I was mad. If I was a student and a writing instructor saw how I write, with time stamps, keystroke entries, what was copied, what was deleted, and yes, what was made by AI, what would that... I feel entirely naked just describing how I write—I would be mortified if someone could see that entire process. Marc Watkins directs the AI Institute for Teachers and is an Assistant Director of Academic Innovation at the University of Mississippi, where he is a Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric.

He has led research initiatives, exploring generative AI’s impact on student learning, training workshops for faculty on AI literacy, and multiple institution-wide AI institutes. His work with generative AI in education predates ChatGPT and he advocates approaching the technology’s integration in education with curious skepticism. When training faculty in applied artificial intelligence, he believes educators should be equally supported if they choose to work with AI or include friction to curb AI’s influence on student learning. His work with training faculty in AI literacy has been profiled in The Washington Post. He regularly writes about AI and education on his Substack Rhetorica. I hope you spend this summer seeking rest and renewal and that carries you through the fall and spring.

I’m finding that now, in bits and pieces, but I won’t lie and say it has been quiet. This week, I was on an IHE panel Digital Crossroads: What Today’s CTOs Reveal About Tomorrow’s Campus discussing the risks of generative AI within existing campus systems. A few weeks ago I flew to New York City to be on a panel at EAB’s Presidential Experience Lab held at OpenAI’s headquarters. I spent two days with nearly 90 university presidents talking about how generative AI was impacting our campuses. I went into the event expecting senior campus leaders to tell me why they were going all in on AI. After all, that’s become the popular story we hear about massive AI rollouts from CSU and now OSU along with several other institutions.

However, the sentiment I heard repeated over and over was quite the opposite. Many people I spoke with asked how we can ensure our institution’s values are maintained now that generative AI is here. The leadership of our universities aren’t monolithic figureheads—they’re human beings like you and I. Most rose from the ranks of faculty and asked the same types of questions many of us have asked now that generative AI is part of our reality: What’s AI's impact on critical thinking and ethical decision-making? How do we ensure equitable access for all students?

The recent AI marketing blitz is selling a future that many reject. I collected quite a few examples in this post and left ample room for others to analyze the marketing tactics being used, including the Friend AI campaign and the backlash it caused. Navigating how AI impacts education, culture, and society. Assistant Director of Academic Innovation, Director of the Mississippi AI Institute, Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. I train faculty in AI literacy. The number of free subscribers for Rhetorica over time since it was added to the directory.

Let's figure how to best integrate and implement generative AI into today's classrooms! Exploring the creative interface between human and machine in writing, the classroom, and the workplace Generative AI may be one of the most transformative technologies we’ve seen arise in our lifetime, but its integration into our lives and cultural practices has been unwelcome to many people, and for good... The AI industry has relentlessly pushed chatbots into education by making them freely available to every student, even though they know this breaks assessment practices. Signals people use to identify meaning are breaking outside of education. AI-generated slop is present in virtually every workplace, social media feed, and increasingly in interpersonal communication.

Companies have taken a powerful technology that people don’t have prior experience with and released it with the same spammy furor of a Candy Crush clone. It is no wonder we’ve seen the wholesale rejection of AI by some, while others uncritically embrace it to do increasingly human-like tasks. Perhaps most alarming is the pivot we’ve seen play out this year from companies signaling to workers that the expectation isn’t to learn how to use AI to augment human skills, shifting instead to... Once a task or role is automated, it rarely returns. Rhetorica is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

One of the easiest entry points to start a conversation about AI is viewing one of the recent commercials or campaigns and analyzing how AI is being sold. There are many! Watching a few is enough to get a sense of how saturated the landscape has become. It will also hopefully give rise to some thoughtful questions about what is being sold, who the audience is, and why it matters. For the second year in a row, the annual Coca-Cola holiday commercial is entirely AI-generated, but that’s just a sample of what’s out there. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November of 2022, countless companies have followed suit, releasing their own flavor of generative AI to the public marketing their tools as part of a grand public experiment.

The features you can access for the $20 plan for GPT-4 are better than anything the government has—there’s no super secret AI in development at the Pentagon. For the first time in history, the general public has access to the most advanced technology, not the military or private industry. You and your 85-year-old neighbor can access the same features through GPT-4 as an analyst studying misinformation for the NSA. No one is sure what the exact consequences are for society. You can now use generative AI in any interface—all through Google Chrome’s browser. Simply activate the “Help Me Write” feature, and you are one click away from adding generative text to any web interface.

It’s another inflection point, but we’ve already had so many that most people likely won’t notice. After all, the market is so saturated with generative this and that, why pay attention to yet another feature? Well, this one matters. In our cloud-connected world, having a browser-based AI that’s always available, scanning whatever web page you are on, and scrapping all of the data is a security nightmare. I wish I had an answer for how we deal with this in our classrooms, but I don’t. I don’t think anyone has a clue how to handle browser-based AI in countless businesses that work with sensitive data in our cloud-connected world.

The balanced view is that such a feature gives users easier access to generative features on-demand. This could help people complete simple tasks efficiently that are often mundane. My students can use it to complete their assignments in Blackboard in a faster amount of time than it takes to copy and paste a prompt into ChatGPT. With a single click, the AI reads the assignment prompt and gives them a short answer—they don’t even need to copy the prompt. I know many will become quite upset about this, but that’s not what scares me. As an educator, I can then click on a student submission and do the same thing to offer them feedback using AI from my browser.

Not only is this an ethical dilemma for faculty—it’s also a major FERPA issue as the student assignment is scanned into the AI. I can write a few sentences of simple feedback generated by AI in seconds, but it takes me longer to process that student’s submission and put it in conversation with the broader learning outside... The AI doesn’t know what the student did in class, how they contributed to the conversation, or how what they wrote added to those earlier insights. It simply generates a competent response that uses dozens of words to say very little.

People Also Search

Navigating How AI Impacts Education, Culture, And Society. I Helped

Navigating how AI impacts education, culture, and society. I helped found the Mississippi AI Institute for Teachers because generative AI is unavoidable in our classrooms. I regularly write about AI on Substack and in a column at The Chronicle of Higher Education. How we talk about AI in education must change. Like so many things in our world, our well-intentioned efforts to solve one problem ushe...

We’ve Seen The Rush To Adopt AI-powered Detectors, Experiments With

We’ve seen the rush to adopt AI-powered detectors, experiments with linguistic finger-printing, watermarking AI outputs through cryptography, and now an advanced form of long-term proctoring called process tracking. The ground truth is faculty are turning to AI detection because they are burning out. They can’t keep up with all the ways AI can impact writing or do assignments for students. They’re...

My Wife Told Me To Relax And Not Do Any

My wife told me to relax and not do any work, so I did my best to stay offline. This of course didn’t happen like I’d planned. For this essay, I’d write a paragraph or two, maybe even some of them were rants, and delete them. The kids run past. We’d go out for five or six hours, and come back for a rest. I’d start again.

I’d Take A Sentence I’d Written For This Piece And

I’d take a sentence I’d written for this piece and save it into my notes for a presentation or future talk, copy a link to another writer’s article, and maybe even use AI to... Read it after a few hours, decide I didn’t like it, and then go about and delete it. If an editor saw my writing process they’d think I was mad. If I was a student and a writing instructor saw how I write, with time stamps,...

He Has Led Research Initiatives, Exploring Generative AI’s Impact On

He has led research initiatives, exploring generative AI’s impact on student learning, training workshops for faculty on AI literacy, and multiple institution-wide AI institutes. His work with generative AI in education predates ChatGPT and he advocates approaching the technology’s integration in education with curious skepticism. When training faculty in applied artificial intelligence, he believ...