By: Anne Manning / Harvard Staff Writer
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences foregrounded a response to and exploration of rapidly developing artificial intelligence technologies throughout the 2023–24 academic year, particularly large language models like GPT-4, or text-to-image generators like Midjourney.
Christopher Stubbs, FAS Dean of Science through June 2024, was among the first to recognize the transformative changes AI would bring about on campus and worldwide. “Early on, we asked that our faculty become aware of and proficient with these tools, and we started thinking about how we would incorporate them into instruction, and about how we would teach our students to be ethical and responsible users,” Stubbs said. The Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy, Stubbs now serves as senior advisor on AI to Edgerley Family Dean of the FAS Hopi Hoekstra.
Starting early last academic year, the FAS convened a working group chaired by computer scientist and Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology Latanya Sweeney and Dean of Administration and Finance Scott Jordan to investigate AI-enhanced teaching, learning, and research. Utilizing the newly launched Harvard AI Sandbox, FAS faculty and staff were able to quickly experiment with and integrate AI into their pedagogy, research, and work.
“The speed at which HUIT spun up internal resources that were privacy-protected and met other data-protection requirements was really impressive,” Stubbs said.
Engagement was immediate, highlighted by several standing room-only events, including the AI @ FAS Symposium that included a faculty research show-and-tell. Panelists, including Professor of Economics Melissa Dell and Professor of the History of Science Alex Csiszar, wrestled with some of the most fundamental questions facing Harvard and higher education today: What is original scholarship in the age of AI? How should students be using AI in their coursework?
At the symposium, faculty across disciplines demonstrated how they’re incorporating the technology into their research while others shared AI-driven innovations around teaching as well as administrative initiatives and tasks.
“Rise of the Machines?”—a new General Education course on understanding and using generative AI—was also offered for the first time and co-taught by Stubbs and Associate Dean of Science Education Logan McCarty. This fall, Harvard Extension School will debut an Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate.
Building on all of these efforts, the FAS has upped its investment in AI, introducing a school-wide ChatGPT Edu license to make the technology more accessible to the entire community.
What’s more, in collaboration with the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and HUIT, the FAS is piloting custom AI “tutor bots,” which will act as complementary instructors in the following introductory courses: Life Sciences 1a, Economics 10, Introductory Chinese, and Expository Writing. With the new availability of ChatGPT Edu, the Bok Center and HUIT are also developing resources to enable any instructor to integrate tutor bots into their courses.
“We are thinking about the ways generative AI can augment student engagement with their courses,” said Karen Thornber, faculty director of the Bok Center, which offered tailored workshops on GAI and its applications to more than 25 departments and programs last year and hired a stable of undergraduate Generative AI Course Assistants.
The Bok Center is also helping instructors develop best practices to help with, for example, identifying patterns in student questions in real time, or ascertaining early on which students are struggling and with which materials.
“We want to stress that everything we’re doing is evolving rapidly,” Thornber said. “I anticipate that much of what we did this summer will be outdated by next summer, but at least we’ll be ahead of the curve and be able to learn along with and grow with changes in generative AI.”
The FAS will also continue to lead exploration into making AI a helpful adjunct for faculty in their scholarly work, Stubbs said, even as society grapples with questions around whether tools like ChatGPT will change how humans view expertise and scholarship. As Stubbs underscored: “These AI tools are no substitute for domain knowledge.”
Even so, changes to teaching and research are inevitable in the era of AI, and Stubbs said there is only one path forward. “We’ll take what we’ve learned this past year and keep building.”