RE Log - Fall 2023

12 Ransom Everglades LOG FALL 2023 By Matt Margini Humanities Department Faculty Since its debut last November, ChatGPT has lost a bit of the show-pony sheen of its early days. For months, the software, a “chatbot” interface developed by OpenAI that can produce rivers of text in response to virtually any prompt, made headlines and dazzled the world as it seemed to crush ever-more-elaborate intellectual benchmarks. GPT-4, the newest version, passed the multistate bar exam in the 90th percentile; received a 5 on AP US History; even scored a 77 percent on the Advanced Sommelier Exam for professional wine-tasters, despite not having taste buds at all. Then, as the novelty wore off, ChatGPT did what it was inevitably going to do, slotting quietly into the workflows of white-collar professionals and taking on a percentage of the world’s intellectual labor. Now it writes legal briefs for lawyers. It does most of the actual coding for software engineers. It probably wrote at least part of the most recent mass email you didn’t read. For educators, however, the Age of AI has only raised more questions in the months since ChatGPT’s debut. Big questions, fundamental questions – the kinds of questions that most teachers didn’t think they would have to confront only three years after the Covid-19 pandemic forced its own paradigm shift. What will critical thinking look like when so much thinking can be outsourced to machines? What will computer science look like if humans no longer need to learn how to write code? Can we even assign essays anymore? For Humanities Department Chair Jen Nero, these questions are a feature, not a bug. Nero is the chair of the school’s new Artificial Intelligence Ransom Everglades (AIRE) Task Force, which was formed last semester by teachers determined to confront concerns that were already simmering in the background of the pre-AI digital age. “I think it’s going to heighten educators. It’s pushing us really, really hard to raise our game, and I think that’s probably one of the things I’m most excited about,” she said. Convened in February, AIRE includes faculty and staff members from humanities, STEM, world languages and Taking on AI RE faculty together confront the challenges of artificial intelligence AIRE Task Force: Pedro Silva, Luis Felipe, Paul Natland ’02 , Jen Nero, Felipe Amaro, Linda Lawrence, Matt Margini, Adam Schachner, Quinn Donoho (not pictured: Alfredo Palacio) Photos by Suzanne Kores