AI EDUCATION

Some academics fear AI. LSU’s provost is leading a class on it

BY JOHN BUZBEE @thebuzzbuz

Roy Haggerty, LSU Vice President and Provost, used ChatGPT to make the syllabus for the class he’s teaching about articifial intelligence. He said it saved him hours.

The class, called HNRS 3035, is designed to teach students the ethics, the real-world applications and the development of large language models, a variety of AI akin to ChatGPT. The class was announced via email in late July.

Haggerty personally oversaw the course’s creation in response to the “world changing” after the widespread release of ChatGPT late last year.

“Tools existed prior to ChatGPT being released, but what ChatGPT did was democratize access to these kinds of models, meaning that all of a sudden, essentially the entire world had access,” Haggerty said.

He said he spent many weekends and evenings learning about ChatGPT under the pretext that large language models held tremendous potential to complement applications in higher education. Every part of day-to-day work can benefit from it, he said, for faculty and students alike.

Haggerty explained this by providing a hypothetical he believes is a realistic possibility:

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He said the university could benefit from a large language model, which he dubbed MikeGPT for the sake of example, that could prowl LSU’s multitudes of publicly accessible documents to provide users with information that should be theoretically accessible but are hard to locate or understand.

“It’s a very, very rapidly evolving field,” Haggerty said. “One of the best ways to help position LSU to take advantage of AI would be for us to have a real world class on AI here. Why I’m teaching it personally is because I’d like to develop the LSU capacity in artificial intelligence for practical use at the university.”

Haggerty said he’s aware of the piling worries and criticisms that a large number of professors hold over these rapidly evolving technologies, many of whom saw

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their syllabuses’ plagiarism and academic dishonesty clauses disenfranchised overnight.

“The better way to look at these is ‘How can I teach the students to use these technologies responsibly,’” Haggerty said.

He said AI’s emergence in the classroom is similar to the introduction of the calculator when he