38 | LEHIGH ALUMNI BULLETIN students to explore the technology. He had one student who used ChatGPT to co-write a play and cited it as a source. “I don’t think we have an option about ‘if’ we want to interface with generative AI in the future,” Gabel says. “It’s not about if, it’s about how.” THE BENEFITS AND PITFALLS Jeremy Littau, an associate professor with the Department of Journalism and Communication, is teaching an Eckardt Scholars class for firstyear students in the 2023 fall semester titled “Digital Identity in an AI World.” The class explores how students construct their lives both online and offline and now co-exist with generative AI. ChatGPT, particularly, demands a lot of the user, he says. “My ability to ask questions and ask follow-up questions is the thing that makes or breaks the experience,” he says. For example, Littau asked ChatGPT to write his wife a Valentine’s Day card, which he said “turned out really flowery and dull.” He made the card more personalized by asking it to incorporate Star Wars. “The follow-up question was really the driver of what I got. ... The initial responses should provide you with directions on where to go next. You can’t stop at the first answer,” Littau says. He believes fears about ChatGPT’s use in education are overblown because it doesn’t produce quality work on its own. Students need to be knowledgeable to make sure it’s returning an accurate answer, and they need to keep refining their questions to yield better answers, he says. “They have to know what questions to ask,” Littau says. “It’s a process that resembles journalism, which is all about knowing which questions to ask and how to follow up.” Suzanne Edwards, an associate professor of English and faculty member in women’s gender and sexuality studies at Lehigh, has been co-teaching the course “Algorithms and Social Justice” with Larry Snyder, the Harvey E. Wagner Endowed Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Deputy Provost for Faculty Affairs at Lehigh. In the fall 2022 semester, their students read “Algorithms of Oppression,” by Safiya Noble, about how search engines reinforce negative stereotypes with technologies like autofill. In another activity, students experimented with GPT3, the precursor to ChatGPT. They found that, when prompted with a short, neutral phrase, such as “Black women” or “Asian men,” GPT3 returned racist, sexist and otherwise toxic responses, Edwards says. “I have to tell you, the experiment was so shocking we had to abandon it because it was so disturbing,” Edwards says. OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, have since updated the program, but Edwards said it still returns biased and sometimes racist results. “The biased content is still there, just in a less obvious way, which in some respects is more dangerous,” she says. OpenAI feeds a huge amount of websites and text from the internet into ChatGPT and then uses prediction algorithms to determine how words appear in relation to one another, Edwards explains. The problem is ChatGPT relies on the internet, “and we all know the internet is a cesspool where people share the worst content. That is not being filtered out of the model,” she says. The latest version of ChatGPT can have various biases in its outputs, and while there has been progress, there’s still more to do, OpenAI says on its website. “We aim to make AI systems we build have reasonable default behaviors that reflect a wide swathe of users’ values, allow those systems to be customized within broad bounds and get public input on what those Amazon’s Alexa can read the latest headlines, play a favorite song and dim the lights in your living room. Now the digital voice assistant is also helping students navigate Lehigh. The “Echo Hawks” project tested an Echo Dot smart speaker in the Health, Science and Technology Building. The device is now in the STEPS building with the hope of bringing the technology to other buildings. Students prompt the device by saying, “Alexa, open Mountain Hawk.” They can then ask questions such as how to find a professor’s office, get directions to buildings and access a menu for Rathbone Dining Hall. The latest version can also answer questions available on Lehigh’s website, such as when to register for classes. The students provide a phone number and the information is texted to them. Echo Hawks started as a Creative Inquiry project spearheaded by Provost Nathan Urban. The project is part of the Campus Sustainable Impact Fellowship. Because of its accessibility, Urban believes universities can use Alexa to provide JEREMY LITTAU Associate Professor, Journalism and Communication SUZANNE EDWARDS Associate Professor of English ALEXA, CAN YOU LEAD THE WAY AT LEHIGH? Thaksheel Alleck ’25 CHRISTA NEU
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