CAE Conversations on AI/ChatGPT

Dear Colleagues, 

As you no doubt having been reading for the past few weeks, a new artificial intelligence website called ChatGPT has been generating a lot of conversation. What’s made ChatGPT so noteworthy is that it’s capable of creating entirely new text in response to a question or prompt, based solely on facts and patterns of writing that it has been trained to examine. In short, the tool can “write” essays and papers that are not direct copies of existing works and therefore cannot be found through traditional plagiarism checkers, like Blackboard’s SafeAssign. 

We in the CAE have been closely monitoring the news, opinion pieces, and pedagogical conversations surrounding ChatGPT and related tools (including the analogous graphics- and art-generating tools Stable Diffusion and DALL-E). In an effort to help us wrap our heads around what all this means for teaching and learning, we will be convening a series of Faculty Roundtable Discussions. These conversations will take place both in person and on Zoom to help us collectively determine what the CAE’s next steps should be as we aim to support all faculty in dealing with these tools. The CAE is also creating an artificial intelligence section on our internal website (https://bit.ly/caeresources) to collect materials that may be helpful to our colleagues. 

Our discussions will take place at the following times:

• Wednesday, 1/25: 10-11 am (in person)
• Thursday, 1/26: 5:30-6:30 pm (on Zoom)
• Tuesday, 1/31: 2-3 pm (in person)
• Tuesday, 1/31: 6:45-7:45 pm (on Zoom)

Please use the link below to sign up for a session - and feel free to join more than one if you’d like, as the conversations will clearly differ depending on the individual attendees, their experiences, and their perspectives on the topic (no prior knowledge of or experience with ChatGPT is necessary). If you’re interested in joining the conversation but are unable to make any of the above meetings, email us at cae@fairfield.edu and let us know some general days and times that you are available and we’ll do our best to schedule an additional discussion session.

Thanks to everyone who has already contacted us in regard to ChatGPT. We look forward to facilitating a robust dialogue that can help us successfully manage this latest technological advancement.

Register for an AI Discussion Session: https://form.123formbuilder.com/6344349/2023039-ai-chatgpt-conversations

Sincerely,

Nick Kapoor

Jay Rozgonyi

Emily Smith

Debbie Whalley

The Center for Academic Excellence