14 | LEHIGH ALUMNI BULLETIN for a task in which most young people can easily judge success or failure, they are able to quickly see the strengths and limitations of the tool. “I’m then able to say, ‘If I gave you a prompt that had to do with biochemistry and you got an answer for an assignment, would you feel as confident sending it to your biochemistry professor?’” Khan says. From there, Khan teaches students various ways to help improve the accuracy and outputs of LLMs, for example, by breaking a complex problem down into a chain of logic, assigning a role to an LLM to draw from a particular field of expertise or even feeding answers back into AI to check work. The course will end with students using AI tools to complete research on a complex topic. By learning how to better use AI, Khan hopes that he is able to help students see it as less of a mysterious “oracle” spitting out answers from beyond, and more of a mechanism they can manipulate to generate trustworthy answers to help them solve problems. Paola Cereghetti, teaching associate professor of physics, is similarly taking an experimental, inquiry-based approach with a “Big Questions” course on using AI for medical imaging. By analyzing various approaches, she and students were able to examine together areas in which AI might improve diagnoses of medical conditions, as well as where it falls short. The problem with AI, she’s able to point out to students, is that it struggles in areas where it confronts something it’s never seen before, making identification of novel patterns difficult, which makes it no substitute in the end for human judgment. “It seems we may be far away from really having AI replace our radiologist,” she says. At the same time she and students are exploring the use of AI in medicine, Cereghetti has also experimented with using AI tools in class, giving students assignments to use generative AI to brainstorm presentation topics and analyze “They’ll be expected to use it and will be competing against people who know how to use it—and so we want to teach them how to use AI tools effectively, while also teaching them to use them ethically.” —NATHAN URBAN, PROVOST AND SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR ACADEMIC AFFAIRS Bilal Khan Paola Cereghetti
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==