The rise of generative AI in education and the workplace brings challenges and questions for students, faculty and employees at the University of Arkansas. Ozarks at Large's Gigi Kraemer has more on how the school and its students are managing emerging AI technology.
For many college students now, imagining an academic experience without the assistance of generative AI may seem like a long-gone memory. But it's been less than four years since this technology became widely available, and for senior broadcast student Wisdom Harlan, that was quite an adjustment.
"I'm thinking freshman year, I don't think I used ChatGPT. I think I was at that point still using search engines, just seeing what I could do. And then I feel like ChatGPT, I really started utilizing it probably junior year, and a lot of it was just to get context on things because I could tell it knows everything about everything."
OpenAI launched ChatGPT-3 in late 2022. It was far from the first AI assistant, but it was one of the first to offer users the easier-to-digest chatbot interface.
Students aren't the only ones who have been adapting to this technology. The University of Arkansas has too. A task force stood up in the second half of 2024. That's Chase Rainwater, the head of the AI task force and department head of industrial engineering at the University of Arkansas.
"About nine months of work, kind of getting a baseline of campus and other institutions. That resulted in a report that then led to a little bit more of a permanent governance structure on campus with some working groups in the areas of teaching and research and data security and ethics and training."
Rainwater says the university's general stance is that they actually encourage faculty and staff to use it wisely — in many cases, to upskill and to integrate AI where they can get gains in education and learning and ultimately in skills for the workforce.
"We're staying aggressive even though we understand that that's going to naturally cause challenges for oversight. But where we think that the potential outweighs those challenges."
When the topic of generative AI comes up in the news, it's often viewed as a tool to cheat on classwork. However, it's a tool many students will encounter in the workplace and throughout the rest of their lives. So instead of outright banning it, Rainwater says the university is working to strike a balance with AI in an educational setting.
"It's a temptation to circumvent the normal or the regular process that can take time and just a little bit of struggle. And I know it's often easy to kind of avoid that struggle, but it's hard to replace that aha moment just with the answer. Using it along a journey to learning — great. Using it very specifically on a grade or points for this assignment, just to get the right answer and not really knowing what that means — those are the traps that you certainly don't want students to fall into."
Harlan says as a student, it's critical to communicate with your professors about it.
"I always make sure to talk to my teacher first. I don't use it on papers, but if it is something that I can kind of get some context from — whether that's plugging in a research journal and kind of getting the bullet points — is that okay to do in this class? I think that's a good rule of thumb for students: just making sure that it is okay with your professor and checking that syllabus before."
The reality is that for many students, this is the answer. Beyond the general guidelines set by the university, usage will differ from college to college and even course to course. To help students with this, the AI task force's work was compiled and put online. The ethical and security concerns Rainwater mentioned are all listed as they pertain to things like using AI in research and data classification.
Now, many students are starting to explore uses for AI outside of the classroom. Harlan says she's used tools like ChatGPT to help with career readiness.
"I think it's really great when it comes to career building — things like LinkedIn, helping tweak certain things because you want to sound like a professional, but you also want to sound like yourself. I don't think AI is the end all, be all. I think it's a starting point."
Harlan says one way she finds it most helpful is preparing for interview responses.
"It's a lot to go back through and be like, okay, in this exact moment, what did I really do? I can make a bulleted list, but it's nice to be able to plug my resume in there and be like, okay, I need you to pull situation, task, action, results for me and kind of prep me for interviews or elevator pitches. It should be easy to talk about yourself, but when you actually get to the point, it's like, I don't want to just ramble. So what are the main points? I love doing that with ChatGPT."
A decade ago, if you wanted advice on how to improve your resume, you had to go to a dozen websites yourself, curate the best tips and go from there. Now you can just ask ChatGPT, and it digs through the internet in an instant. For college students balancing school, extracurriculars and the job search, that efficiency matters.
"I think efficiency is really the main idea. It really doesn't take me long to write an email anymore because I have my rough draft, put it in ChatGPT and say check for grammar. My email is done in less than 10 minutes."
Rainwater says the university is also doing what it can to keep students up to date and career ready.
"We regularly are asking industry for input, and industry is regularly asking us what we're going to do — that kind of chicken-and-egg thing. But the conversations are really active right now."
Rainwater and Harlan have similar attitudes toward AI in the university setting — focused on extracting the best use cases from it while still preserving the learning environment. Harlan likes the efficiency it offers in proofreading emails and recruiting study guides, but she still values learning the skills she attends the university to learn.
"We're getting broadcast journalism degrees. We're getting communication degrees. We're writers. We should know how to write without a robot."
You can take a look at the university's campus guidelines around AI, university-approved tools and more details about the task force at ai.uark.edu. For Ozarks at Large, I'm Gigi Kraemer.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
