JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
Every breakthrough, every innovation, every bold idea shaping our future begins with curiosity and the people willing to follow it.
LISA JONES:
From research labs to manufacturing, from discarded materials to the next generation of design, this is Bright Path...
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
where science meets creativity and ideas come to life.
LISA JONES:
Artificial intelligence is already shaping how discoveries are made in labs, in classrooms, and even in the way ideas take form. But here's the question: If AI is helping us think faster, are we still the ones deciding how we think?
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
Because this isn't just about technology; it's about how decisions get made, what gets trusted, and what gets left out.
LISA JONES:
Yes, and you know, from research labs to everyday life, those changes—they're already happening right now.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
And you know, most of us don't even realize it.
Welcome to Bright Path, where we connect science, technology, engineering, the arts, and the people bringing it all to life.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
We're glad you're here with us.
LISA JONES:
Hey, everybody. My name is Lisa Jones, and this is my co-host Johnnie Aycock.
Artificial intelligence is no longer something universities are experimenting with. It's something they're actively using. And to help us answer some of our questions, we want to welcome Dr. Katie Chiou.
Dr. Chiou is an associate professor of anthropology in the Bearfield College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama. She co-founded and co-directs the Artificial Intelligence Teaching Enhancement Initiative. She also leads the Straker Project, which is the student training in responsible AI knowledge and ethics research. This is an NSF-funded initiative focused on teaching AI ethics in STEM classrooms. Dr. Chiou, welcome to the Bright Path Studio.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Thank you so much, Lisa and Johnnie. It's so great to be here with y'all.
LISA JONES:
Nice to have you. So we're just going to dive right in. Is AI a natural evolution of human tools, or would you say that it's something fundamentally different?
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
That is a really great question, Lisa. And I guess I'm going to answer it from the perspective of being an archeologist. So, I'm trained on studying human material culture over thousands of years of human history. So when I see natural evolution, I mean, that's an interesting sort of way of framing it. You know, I'm not sure how any of it is necessarily natural or intentional. I think when you look at the history of the relationship between humans and technology, humans invent the technology. The technology also affects the way in which humans progress. So, in some ways, it's kind of an interesting sort of symbiotic relationship. There are some things, of course, that make AI feel entirely novel, right, and different.
LISA JONES:
Sure.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
So you may hear about this type of technology being very disruptive. What's different about it is that it is accelerating incredibly quickly. So while certain things, let's say, for example, the origins of farming may have taken thousands of years, or even thinking about the Industrial Revolution that took, you know, decades, AI in the span of a couple of years has gone global and has scaled up at such a quick pace that it's very difficult for a lot of our institutions to keep up with it. So here in higher education, oftentimes it feels like we're just playing catch-up and constantly behind. And in all my conversations with many of my peers, that is the way that everybody is feeling these days.
So I think it's causing a lot of confusion because, in many ways, one of the interesting things that it's able to do is to kind of veer into the realm of human judgment, which, to a certain extent, is a little bit different than before. So in prior revolutions that we've seen, we've had a lot of different kinds of both intentional and unintentional consequences. Impacts on labor, for example, have always been a thing. Automation has always caused some jobs to cease and other ones to be created.
Now with AI, I think a lot of the fears revolve around the fact that it, to a certain extent, asserts a level of epistemic authority. Right, it acts like it knows what it's doing and saying. It's trained on a massive amount of data. It uses up a lot of compute, and it's capable of doing things that previously we would have held firmly in the realm of the human.
LISA JONES:
Sure.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
And so, in that way, I think that's kind of different than before. And so, I think in trying to anticipate what that means for us right now, there are some things that we can see in terms of the end of certain ways of doing things, but there's also a whole range of possibilities, both sort of on the positive, beneficent side and potentially on the more negative, existential side that, you know, we are all thinking about and worrying about these days. So it's complicated.
LISA JONES:
It is complicated, and maybe that's why you all brought the AI Teaching Enhancement Initiative to the
University of Alabama. So a little bit of a follow-up to that would be: Can you tell us a little bit about that initiative? What is the mission and the role of the AI Teaching Enhancement Initiative at the University of Alabama?
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Yeah, so AITI started in basically 2023. So, you know, if we zoom back a few years, you'll remember that in November 2022, ChatGPT dropped. It was, I guess, the first real public recognition of the fact that we had this technology called generative AI that's trained on billions and now trillions of parameters that essentially takes all the knowledge off of the internet and uses it to generate outputs, right?
LISA JONES:
Right.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Not only text but other kinds of modes as well. And so around that time, myself and my colleague in the Department of History, Lawrence Capello, being very engaged educators, we had a lot of chats about ways of dealing with post-pandemic student disengagement and other kinds of issues we were seeing in the classroom. This issue of generative AI came up and how we were going to contend with it.
And I'll be fully honest, many of our early conversations veered kind of negative. We were very worried about the potential of our jobs being affected. We were worried about how we would suddenly deal with this in the classroom in terms of how this was going to impact teaching and learning.
So naturally, after going through the stages of grief, we reached out to some of our colleagues, you know, sort of in our networks. We attended a lot of workshops. The Southeastern Conference, beyond being an athletic conference, also has an academic side, and they have an AI consortium that was holding a lot of events. We found out that people were thinking about this technology in really interesting ways.
Clearly, there were issues to contend with that were going to threaten some of the ways in which we had been doing things, but there were also a lot of opportunities to think about novel ways to apply AI to teaching and learning.
So we applied for a grant, got the opportunity to go and visit some of these SEC institutions, including the University of Florida, Auburn, and Ole Miss. And by doing that, we had an opportunity to talk to people from a range of different kinds of fields. We talked to decision-makers at the high levels, as well as heads of institutes and centers, down to students as well, to see how they were contending with this in different kinds of environments.
So obviously, large public research institutions like the University of Florida that have a lot of resources, and then smaller ones as well. Since then, we've had the opportunity also to visit community colleges and high schools.
So it's been an amazing opportunity to really get a sense of how to build a network of people who are interested in this topic and think of ways in which we all collectively problem-solve.
And so far, there have not been clear answers. I think that's one prevailing theme about AI: there are a lot of gray areas and a lot of concerns. But also, at the same time, one wonderful thing for both Lawrence and me has been returning to the fundamentals of teaching and learning.
LISA JONES:
Right, because that's one of my favorite parts. I mean, you guys introduced that in our other studio, and I love to hear about the blue books coming back. Sometimes it's oral exams, maybe other ways to address it, right, Katie?
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in many ways, we were asking ourselves, like, oh, why is it that we were always assigning large-scale essays, for example, at the end of every semester? Is that always the most appropriate output for certain kinds of classes?
It's made us think about things like scaffolding, right, and thinking about how to break down learning into discrete tasks, what potentially to bring into the classroom. We've gone into discussions about the science of listener attention and different kinds of things.
So in one way, because ChatGPT and similar chatbots have threatened the way we have typically done our practice in higher education, it's caused us to revisit fundamentals. So for people interested in education, it's actually been a very interesting time to be a professor or an instructor.
LISA JONES:
Absolutely, yeah.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
Katie, it's great to see you again.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Great to see you too, Johnnie.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
You've mentioned a couple of things in your first answer about the speed of things, which I think is scaring a lot of people. I suspect out there in the community, you know, we laypeople, a lot of folks are afraid of it and the speed of it.
But I think one of the basic questions that we're hearing that you might be able to address—and it may be too early to answer this—is: Is AI actually helping us to learn better? Are we learning better? Or are we just doing things faster?
LISA JONES:
And if so, how could that be?
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Yeah. So, I mean, that's a question we ask ourselves all the time. In many ways, I think AI has the potential to help us do our work better. Now, has it necessarily been leveraged for those purposes?
You know, one thing that we have to continually contend with is this concept of speed. I think as a society, and you'll hear this all the time in terms of discourse around industry and things, it's all about efficiency and optimizing. You know, we can talk about profits and everything being more near-term versus longer-term goals.
And I think that sort of infiltrated into higher education as well. There's a tendency these days—and I know I'm generalizing heavily here—for students to focus on outputs and outcomes, right? The final grade, for example, or the test score, or something like that, as opposed to the process of learning.
And so, in some ways, I think we're contending also with cultural changes in terms of valuations and norms that make it a little bit more difficult for us to think thoughtfully about how to integrate AI.
So when I tell instructors that it can be done, part of the training also has to be with dealing with the fact that newer generations of students learn differently and engage with information differently. We're in a very information-heavy, media-heavy type of environment, and in all that noise, sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to focus on learning, which requires slowing down. It requires a level of friction. It requires, as I tell my students all the time, a bit of suffering and overcoming.
And so, sometimes, in lieu of that, there's a tendency for students to want to just get to the ends as quickly as possible.
LISA JONES:
Sure.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
And we understand. I think in our surveys of students about AI use, one thing that's mentioned is that some students use AI in their assignments because they fear that they're at a disadvantage because other students are producing more or doing more with their time.
I notice with a lot of my own students, there's a constant fear of not doing enough or being enough, and I think part of that is just the kind of environment that we're in right now.
So, in terms of what to do in the classroom, a lot of it is just bringing activities back in, which some of our peers are a little upset about because that requires editing down some of the content you normally would cover in a semester.
But it means that we have to do more things collectively. We have to ensure certain guardrails are up sometimes when AI may not be as appropriate because we have to learn some of the fundamentals before AI can be added in.
But at the same time, we don't say that AI is altogether bad. There are some potential use cases where AI can actually really help.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
Katie, you've mentioned a couple of things that I want to go back to a little bit. You're an anthropologist. You brought up a couple of major periods when change took a long time, like the agricultural revolution and the Industrial Revolution. And you mentioned the AI revolution is happening so fast. Then you talked briefly about cultural change.
It just seems to me that the cultural change may come too fast if we rely on AI too much. And I don't know if we're prepared. Can you kind of address the cultural impact?
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Yeah, you know, it is daunting if you track the history of technological change. I've had the opportunity to see, for example, some folks from tech companies like Microsoft give presentations showing graphs of various innovations and inventions in the 20th century that indicate that change is happening exponentially and that we are not slowing down.
That's also structural. You may have noticed that in society at large, I think we're reluctant to slow it down. There aren't a lot of guardrails or regulatory frameworks put up right now. It makes it a little difficult for those of us on the ground to contend with because, to a certain extent, it's a move-fast-and-break-things type of environment.
So in terms of culture, you're noticing a lot of different kinds of cultures being built up around it. Just within higher education, even if you go across campus, you'll see that there are corners of campus where there are different sentiments toward AI.
In our surveys, naturally, you'll see that some folks from the creative side of campus may be a little more reluctant or reticent to adopt it. In many ways, I think it threatens some of the traditional work of those fields.
It's the same thing in the social sciences: mixed feelings, fear about how this might ultimately impact people, and a lot of doubts about whether or not it's actually a net positive.
Then you go into other areas where AI is a national priority, and a lot of funding is being placed in AI. There are areas, particularly on the STEM side, where there's encouragement to begin thinking about how AI impacts those fields.
So it ranges across the board in society at large right now. At first, there was a lot of optimism around AI and all the economic potential and the way in which it might alleviate the burden of work so that people could have more leisure time and other things that I know we're all craving.
But I think, seeing the way that it's developed in society, there's also now a lot of fear that AI is causing more inequality in society and that it may be used for problematic ends. It's being heavily incorporated into the military, for example. And there's also the amount of investment we're putting into AI—not only dollars but resources like water and electricity. That's worrying because it means it's pulling away from other things.
LISA JONES:
True. And I'm wondering from your perspective, are you aware of mandates being put in place on a university level for faculty to address it, or is this something that they're just letting the faculty decide on their own on an individual basis?
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Yeah, policy is a very interesting area. I have to admit, I'm not particularly good at crafting policies because, to a certain extent, they tend to be very general. The number of use cases is exponential, and it really does not only vary by discipline but also sometimes on the individual level as well.
So there's a tendency for most institutions to have very broad guidelines about making sure that you communicate what your class's own policy is toward AI.
LISA JONES:
In other words, address it, but we're not going to tell you whether to use it or not.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
For the most part, most institutions now are wading into it. There's a schism, perhaps, where administrators tend to be a little more AI-positive, and there are a lot of faculty who are a little more wary of AI for a variety of reasons.
And then, of course, we have the student angle too, where student use is skyrocketing to the point that it's maybe 70, 80, or 90 percent in some cases. It has caused a really interesting environment where there's a diversity of viewpoints and no prevailing message about what the right thing is, because I think we're still figuring it out. Collectively, we're all figuring it out.
LISA JONES:
And one thing I remember in particular about you and Dr. Lawrence Capello, your co-founder for the initiative: I remember him specifically saying, "We're not here to cheerlead AI." He said that a couple of different times because you've been to our other studio a couple of times. Has that changed at all? Has that attitude evolved at all between the two of you as leaders of this initiative?
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
I don't think that has changed. I mean, when we engaged with this technology early on, I remember there was a level of excitement, just marveling at what it could achieve. Granted, of course, it wasn't perfect, but just the fact that we were seeing what we were seeing at that time—the excitement about the potential use cases for a variety of things, testing out different kinds of assignments we might generate, or ways in which it might help us design better courses—that was exciting.
But I think, in terms of thinking about society at large and whether or not AI was going to be a net positive, it changes even within a day, from fear to excitement to neutrality overall.
Overall, I would say there are a lot of things that are fairly daunting about the technology beyond the technology itself. One thing that everyone has to realize is that technology doesn't just enter into a social, political, or economic vacuum. It's very much served entrenched in everything that's going on.
A lot of the public debates about AI concern who gets to control it, how it's privileged above other societal needs, who's reaping the benefits of it, the way in which it's remaking power structures. That is really worrying. The fact that we've entered into an arms race and it's shifted the global economy in many ways.
And I think a lot of people just feel like they don't have a lot of agency when it comes to AI. A lot of times, people will say, "Oh, I didn't ask for this. Why is AI being incorporated into everything?"
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
I'm concerned that much of society is just going along with it. I mean, how do we manage something this extensive and this unbelievably speeding, Kind of bullet train going down the road? How do we manage that?
I'm wondering, are some people just accepting it or just going along with it? And how do we address that?
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
So this is what I focus on a lot with my own passion for artificial intelligence and ethics: responsible AI use, and also how to train upcoming generations of students to be prepared to walk into a world that's increasingly AI-enabled.
One thing I think we have to get across in society at large right now is that sentiments toward the future are relatively dim. I believe I read a study that said one out of three Americans thinks that the world is going to end in their lifetime.
LISA JONES:
Oh, no.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Right. For the most part, people don't feel like tomorrow is going to be better than today. I notice the same sentiment among my students. We like to joke about nihilism a fair amount. There's the feeling of, "Why should I care? Everything's going to burn anyway." And I understand it.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
That's the way some young people are thinking.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Oh, well, yes, a number of my students, for sure. I don't know about the population at large.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
That's a little bit of a concern.
DR. KATIE CHIOU: Yeah, but in many ways, it's because the society they grew up in has been difficult.
LISA JONES:
I'm not sure how to process that, Katie. I'm not. I don't even know how to react to that.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
In many ways, I think it's so different from my own upbringing, where I was told I could change the world if I just tried hard enough.
LISA JONES:
Of course.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
And granted, that was a little idealistic, but I think in many ways, teaching students to first understand this technology and then figure out ways to navigate a complex world—where you're not going to be perfect or ideologically pure, and you're going to have to make decisions between competing things—that really is where I find my purpose in terms of pedagogical intuition.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
It used to be that the older you get, the faster time goes by.
DR. KATIE CHIOU: Yeah,
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
I actually hear young people talking about how quickly time is flying.
And it must be part of that technological impact that we're all feeling. Maybe it's subtle. I don't know.
It's just that there's a change in the speed of the way we live.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Well, Johnnie, think about the last time you were bored, right? I mean, none of us are—
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
I don't remember that.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
That's something that people talk about a lot when they talk about the death of creativity. In many ways, when you weren't distracted by technology and doom-scrolling—which I do a fair amount of myself—you had time to be introspective and think about things, or think about ways to un-bore yourself.
LISA JONES:
Well, Katie, my best ideas still come when I'm in the shower.
DR. KATIE CHIOU: Or when you're running or whatever, right? Like disconnecting. So for people who have grown up with technology, with iPads, iPhones, and whatnot, it's a little difficult to move that away from you, to a certain extent. It becomes part of your body, right?
And we see this in the classroom all the time. Even when students know they're not supposed to use these devices, they naturally just start messing around with them without any thought, right? That's because it's such a part of what you do on a day-to-day basis.
It affects our sociality. It affects the way in which we talk to each other or don't talk to each other. People talk a lot about the connection between this and the death of the third space, the lack of community, and the loneliness epidemic we're undergoing.
That's being exacerbated by AI, which is now serving as a companion for a lot of people as opposed to real, live humans. So these are all things I think we have to be wary of and keep an eye on.
LISA JONES:
That almost sounds like another in-depth conversation.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Absolutely, yes.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
And that leads me to my world. From an economic perspective, how do you think this is going to affect the way we work, the workforce itself? We're a very competitive global economy. Where is our country? Are we doing the right things to be competitive yet not become slaves to technology? I don't know if that's a fair question or not.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
That's a good question. You know, the techno-optimists would say, "Oh, because AI can now do so much work, we are now, as humans, free from the burden of having to do that. So let's all get universal basic income, have our leisure time, spend time with our families, and do all the things we've been wanting to do."
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
Oh, I can move to the beach.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Yes. The reality has been a little bit different. I think even if we ignore the potential economic impact of the AI bet not working out, the level of investment in AI is astronomical, and if it all goes under, I think it drags our entire economy with it. We're in a crazy...
LISA JONES:
Wait, did you say if it all goes under?
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
There's a lot of fear about bubbles popping, and we've had bubbles popping in the past.
LISA JONES:
That's true, but I never considered that with AI.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Oh yeah, absolutely. AI has yet to yield profit in many ways, right? And the strategy in the United States is, of course, to increase compute. So we're building data centers. We haven't necessarily invested as much in our energy infrastructure as, for example, China. So we're taking different strategies.
There's been a lot of talk in tech, for example, about layoffs and things like that. Some of it's been tied to AI and replacement. Some of it's been tied to overhiring during the pandemic and trying to cover for a lot of investment in AI infrastructure.
So I would say, though, replacement is happening. We can see the impact on fields like graphic design, customer service, and other kinds of support things that used to require humans and now AI can substitute for.
But some of the pilots of AI integration in industry have also failed, right? And shown that in some cases, it is actually creating extra work because now you have to clean up a lot of the stuff that AI has done.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
Yeah, and then you've got the challenge right here in Alabama, like other states. Communities are really wary—matter of fact, almost militant—about having data centers put in their backyard. I don't know if that's a proven fact yet. I don't know what the impact's going to be, but that's another thing that's happening currently, right now, right up the road from us.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Right, because it is taking resources away from the community. It is taking energy and water, And there's also the fear that some of those jobs that are coming in are not necessarily going to be long-term or hiring local folks, right?
So I think people have a lot of reason to be skeptical. In some ways, it feels like a lot of the guardrails, like I mentioned before, have been removed, and to a certain extent, it's being accelerated regardless of what people want.
But as I always tell my own students, where there's a will, there's a way, right? And I think being educated, and knowing how to build networks, and knowing how to talk to people, and knowing how to work collectively is always a strategy for survival in whatever environment you're in.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
We seem to get through these revolutions, but one thing that you and Lawrence have taught us is just remember AI is a tool. It's a very, very good tool if you know how to use it properly, but you don't give up your thinking process. I don't know how people are going to get through this if they don't understand.
And the term critical thinking has almost become a buzzword. I don't like that, but that's exactly what we've got to maintain, and what you guys are doing at the university to help our students remember. But you still have to ask the right question.
DR. KATIE CHIOU: Absolutely, yeah. Stay curious, and like you said, keep asking questions.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
Yeah, makes sense.
LISA JONES:
That is perfect. And on that note, I think we're going to say thank you to Dr. Katie Chiou for coming to see us today in the BrightPath studio.
DR. KATIE CHIOU:
Thank you so much.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
Thank you, Katie. It was great to see you.
LISA JONES:
Thank you so much. For Johnnie Aycock, my name is Lisa Jones, and this has been BrightPath.
JOHNNIE AYCOCK:
Bright Path is made possible in part by our partners at Alabama Public Radio, and by the music of Matt Jones, whose song "This Place" sets the tone for our journey. Thank you.
