{"id":236450,"date":"2025-11-20T07:00:28","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T12:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=236450"},"modified":"2025-11-20T14:28:27","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T19:28:27","slug":"uconn-magazine-riding-the-ai-wave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2025\/11\/uconn-magazine-riding-the-ai-wave\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn Magazine: Riding the AI Wave"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ah-OOG-uh!<\/em><\/p>\n

The discordant sound of an old-fashioned car horn blares, and 100 or so \u00adUConn faculty and staff dining on wraps and chips at round tables morph into a sea of swiveling heads and furrowed brows.<\/p>\n

Are we being pranked? Are we in danger? Did we just travel through time?<\/p>\n

At the podium David Rettinger \u2014 a University of \u00adTulsa psychology professor, \u00adco-author of a book about teaching with AI titled \u201cThe Opposite of Cheating,\u201d and lunchtime keynote speaker \u2014 jerks an arm up and adjusts his smartwatch, \u00adexasperated. Someone in the audience cracks that the culprit behind the horn must be artificial intelligence \u2014 the theme for this daylong conference in Storrs \u2014 but Rettinger owns up to the interruption.<\/p>\n

Turns out the sound signified an incoming call from his elderly father, and Rettinger hadn\u2019t figured out how to silence it ahead of time. \u201cNot AI,\u201d he tells the crowd. \u201cJust a dumb person.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a way, the scene sums up how many in academia feel about AI: Some unseen force is honking at us urgently, and it\u2019s unclear if we should speed up, swerve, or slam on the brakes. It\u2019s a situation that\u2019s making a lot of highly educated people feel dumb. (I also find it amusing and rather reassuring that the guy who literally wrote the book on AI struggles with basic tech settings, just like me.)<\/p>\n

This end-of-school-year event in the Werth Residence Tower is normally called May Day. It\u2019s an annual tradition in which faculty and staff are invited by UConn\u2019s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) to reflect on lessons learned in and out of the classroom, compare notes, and generally help one an\u00adother \u00adbecome better all-around researchers and educators. In honor of the special theme, the 2025 iteration has been christened mAI dAI (pronounced \u201cmy die,\u201d somewhat ominously).<\/p>\n

This year, perhaps more than ever, college educators need help. The rise of widely available artificial intelligence tools, notably ChatGPT and similar large language model (LLM) chatbots, is eliciting a frothy mix of excitement and dread in every industry, education included. Optimists emphasize the technology\u2019s superhuman capabilities \u2014 suddenly, everyone has an incredibly powerful assistant for research, analysis, brainstorming, customized learning, and more in their pocket, available 24\/7. Meanwhile, teachers everywhere fret that AI makes it easier than ever for students to cheat on traditional schoolwork and sidestep learning entirely.<\/p>\n

After working as a reporter and editor for over 20 years, I joined UConn\u2019s journalism department last fall as part of a \u201ccluster hire\u201d of new faculty whose research largely focuses on AI. My duties involve covering AI as a journalistic beat while also experimenting and figuring out when and how to incorporate AI into our coursework. I can\u2019t say how many conversations about AI I\u2019ve had over the past year with colleagues, students, friends, and family, but I\u2019m pretty sure I\u2019m occasionally perceived as the annoying guy who brings up the topic way too often. My wife and kids will vouch for this.<\/p>\n

Read on for more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is Artificial Intelligence a friendly current making life\u2019s ride a smooth glide or a gathering tsunami headed for a certain civilization decimating crash? Depends who you ask<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":236451,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147,2226,2648,2235,102],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[117],"class_list":["post-236450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-clas","category-blue-research","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-magazine"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-17 12:36:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236452,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236450\/revisions\/236452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/236451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236450"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=236450"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=236450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}