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Artificial Intelligence

This guides students to be decisive about and use artificial intelligence (AI).

About this Guide

Many of us will use AI to coordinate our work life in a global economy. This guide enables you to take advantage of your freedoms and opportunities through AI in your daily studies and work while also recognizing the ethics and verifications one should consider.

Notes:

For ASU students, please pay close attention to your course syllabi and trust your professor's judgment on the use of AI in the classroom.

For ASU faculty, we plan to update this guide more frequently compared to most of our research guides since AI is changing at an incredible pace. If you notice anything outdated or inaccessible, please contact the guide owner. Also, you can recommend to us new tools or resources that have been helpful for your classroom.

Definitions

Here are a few terms to look for and understand throughout this guide. Look for further definitions in the eBook below this list:

  • Machine Learning (ML)* is behind many internet services you use already. ML can classify data upon which people train it and adjust parameters to complete new but tightly related tasks (see The Sage Encyclopedia of Surveillance, Security, and Privacy, volume 2).
  • Deep Learning (DL) is an ML technique that more closely matches the human brain and can solve more complex problems (see Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology).
  • Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) trains on large amounts of data to author articles, software code, video, etc. that mimics the creativity of humans (see Salem Press Encyclopedia of Science).
  • Large Language Models (LLMs) are behind the Gen AI chatbots that are popular today. You prompt the chatbot in your natural language and get a non-canned and hopefully sensible answer back in natural language (see Salem Press Encyclopedia of Science
  • Prompt Engineering is the design and refinement of your input to Gen AI services, to get better output for a given task (see Brittanica Academic).
*Author's note: Mistral, ChatGPT, and Duck AI (Claude model option) also assisted me with this definition.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

AI before ChatGPT

Notice in this video how the narrator describes what AI could do already before the improvements that came along with ChatGPT in 2022. What are ways ...

  • You may be using AI without even thinking about it?
  • You wish society would use AI more or less today?
  • You can use AI to improve your study or workplace, even without ChatGPT?

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI)

ChatGPT is one example of Gen AI. Consider comparing the AI described above with today's Gen AI after watching the videos below, then answering the following questions:

  • What are the differences between Gen AI and the models that preceded it?
  • How could you use gen AI to make improvements in your studies or at work?
  • What are new ethical issues with gen AI?

Ethics

UNESCO • Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, Episode 5 (2023)

University Resources

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