RE Log - Fall 2023

16 Ransom Everglades LOG FALL 2023 American beauty ads. AI brought his vision to life in a way that would not have been possible even six months earlier. In a similar way, AI tools have liberated Skye McPhillips ’24 as she works to complete her Bowden Fellowship in the Humanities project, a study of creativity among Dominican tabaqueros (cigar rollers). She’s used ChatGPT to digest and index long academic papers, to provide feedback on her writing, and even – with the help of plugins and the machine learning expertise of Elliott Gross ’24 – as a translator and data analysis tool for her more than 30 interviews. “AI allows [students] to skip phases of searching for a quote for hours or waiting to ask a teacher about their paper right before it’s due, giving [them] more time to think about the next step of their endeavors and pushing them to innovate,” McPhillips said. In a survey that the AIRE Task Force sent out in May, 33 percent of faculty members said that they were already “actively encouraging” their students to use ChatGPT in various projects. That percentage stands to increase significantly in the 2023- 24 school year, which promises to be a massive petri dish of pedagogical experimentation. The experiments will cut across disciplines. In the sciences, students in Paul Natland ’02 ’s physics classes will use ChatGPT “as a coding partner to create visualizations and analyze data” – to the point that Natland is planning to make “effective use of AI tools for problem-solving, brainstorming and drafting” one of his core standards. Students in all sections of biology will use AI tools to do something their peers already did in May: imagine an entirely new species – complete with illustrations. In the humanities, faculty member Kate Bloomfield will allow students in Political Culture in the United States and Understanding the Abrahamic Religions to use ChatGPT to fill out review sheets before assessments – with the caveat that it will be their responsibility to then “tailor” the chatbot’s “often generic” responses to each course’s specific curriculum. Faculty member Cameron Ferguson plans to teach his middle school students how to use AI as a cultural and historical research tool, one that can give them baseline knowledge of a place or time before they delve into more specific lines of inquiry. For upper school photography teacher Matt Stock, the most exciting prospect involves the old meeting the new. In the spring, he helped Bryce Sadler ’24 , a student in his Experimental Photography class, enhance cyanotypes – “a contact-printed analog process from the 1860s” – with the image-generation capabilities of Adobe Firefly, an AI tool that now lives inside Photoshop. As the image transformed from analog to digital and back again, a new way of making art started to take shape. “This year, I want to allow students to mix cutting-edge digital tools with antiquarian methods, and see what they can come up with using a combination of methodologies,” Stock said. From the vantage point of the school’s CTO, being “future- forward” is the only option – and Lawrence said she’s here to support teachers as they use AI tools to try radically new things. “It’s a time where we have to stay ahead of the curve, because we are Ransom Everglades,” she said. “We’ve got such knowledgeable people and such creative people. We have to encourage them to take different strategic approaches and experiment with these tools, so that they can show students not just how to use them to pass this course, but how to use them to create pathways to understanding.” Some version of the Wall-E Textpocalypse seems inevitable as AI tools continue to embed themselves into work, communication and daily life. But I have also thought a lot about another Disney movie: 2014’s Big Hero 6 . In that film, brilliant young people at an engineering academy bring outlandish inventions to life with the aid of AI tools that automate the dirty work: coding, manufacturing, prototyping. The main protagonist, Hiro Hamada, simply has to think of something in his mind, and then a swarm of “microbots” bring his vision into physical form. My five-year-old son already thinks the Fernandez STEM Center literally is the school in that movie. What if he ends up being right? If one way to empower students involves creating a space for them to think for themselves, another involves helping them use the technology to think and create in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before – and in ways that we have yet to imagine. The Artificial Intelligence Ransom Everglades (AIRE) Task Force addresses the RE professional community.