Faculty members and administrators are reporting their latest obstacle to a clean inbox: Emails marketing new AI tools.
Ever since ChatGPT’s arrival last November, companies have been racing to capitalize on the AI hype — or, perhaps, to stay competitive as the tech industry continues to bet big on artificial intelligence. The software marketplace-and-review website G2 reported this year that out of 145,000 software products, the top three fastest-growing ones are AI tools.
And a target market, it appears, is higher education.
Vendors have rapidly rolled out products geared for various college operations. In a poll of more than 700 LinkedIn members, 55 percent reported receiving multiple pitches a week, or having “lost count.” Their roles ran the gamut: Admissions director. Ph.D. student. Associate director for equity and inclusion. Chief budget officer. Research analyst. Assistant vice president for facilities services. Assistant athletics director.
“There have been these tendrils” emerging since the Covid-19 pandemic, said Lance Eaton, director of faculty development and innovation at College Unbound, a small institution in Rhode Island serving adult learners. “But as ChatGPT came out, and there were so many conversations about education,” there was a lot of “‘Oh, this could be a place to get in.’”
There’s more noise than there is signal.
The Chronicle, too, has received dozens of pitches in the last six months. One tool promised to help college staff flag mental-health crises and “threats”; another, to assist in retaining a diverse student population following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June to strike down race-conscious admissions.
Sources The Chronicle interviewed said they are open to using AI in higher education. But most haven’t found the latest offerings particularly innovative, or necessary. They don’t recognize the names of many of the companies, either.
So for now, at least, there’s a lot of clicking “delete.”
“For the most part, there’s more noise than there is signal,” said Brian Basgen, chief information officer at Emerson College, in Boston.
‘Overwhelming’
In ed tech, new developments can quickly generate buzz, only to fizzle later. AI, though, looks to be a different animal.
A recent report on education technology from Unesco stated that, “While many technologies previously promoted as transformative did not live up to expectations, the sheer growth in computing power behind generative AI,” in particular, “raises the question of whether this technology could be the turning point.” And higher-ed sources The Chronicle spoke with agree that this doesn’t feel like a fad. Artificial intelligence is widely applicable and accessible, they say, in a way that other advancements — virtual reality and the metaverse, for example — aren’t (at least for now).
That doesn’t mean everyone is welcoming the recent PR onslaught.
For Jennifer Ann Morrow, an associate professor of evaluation, statistics, and methodology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, it’s been “overwhelming.” As an instructor, she doesn’t receive only vendor emails promoting their latest AI-detection tools, or tools to create rubrics, images, and presentations. She also fields offers from professional organizations to join trainings, webinars, and conferences on the future of AI in education. Last Tuesday alone, she said, she received two invitations to free webinars, and another to a two-day seminar costing more than $400.
Similar advertisements now dog her, too, on Facebook, Twitter (now called X), and LinkedIn.
As she sifts through messaging about new products and webinars, Morrow said she finds herself asking, “Who’s the expert?” Often, she simply doesn’t engage.
Same with Jesús Aceves Loza, an assistant director of the Institute of American Language and Culture at Fordham University, in New York. He regularly gets pitches for tools to help him with project management, like meeting-scheduling and workflow-automation software. He’s not uninterested, per se, but it’s “hard to keep up” and separate the wheat from the chaff.
“It takes time to really assess and try out a tool and find its value and its ethical and legal implications,” he said. “And I’m getting way more apps than I have the time to assess.”
Basgen, at Emerson, has yet to be impressed. The vast majority of pitches, he said, don’t strike him as innovative. Rather, they feel like a repackaging of what already exists.
He recalled a recent pitch for a purported “cutting edge” tool providing sentiment analysis (analyzing digital texts to determine if the emotional tone of the message is positive, negative, or neutral). This capability isn’t new, he said. Chatbots are another example.
To Basgen, it appears that many companies are taking advantage of the fact that when people hear the word “AI” right now, they think of ChatGPT, a tool that, while imperfect, boasts capabilities most people have never seen before, like the power to pass an M.B.A. exam.
In reality, the meaning of “AI” is increasingly expanding, and abstract.
Saying something uses AI in 2023 “is almost like saying, ‘Oh, this runs on computers,’” Basgen said. The term “describes a lot of different technologies and a lot of different capabilities. ... It’s just not as distinctive as some of the marketers would like to have you believe.”
Eaton, at College Unbound, said there have been a few cases where he’s seen products worth a closer look: A Siri-like AI “assistant” that helps teachers quickly access various apps and device functions. A search tool that scans text and recommends relevant research papers. He’s been operating on “word of mouth,” not taking a product seriously until he hears or reads about “somebody else who has tried it, and feels it has merit.”
Morrow is also waiting to hear what her tech-savvy students are interested in, and using, beyond ChatGPT.
”I always ask in my classes, ‘Is there another resource that I can provide? Is there something that’s helped you?’” she said. “They’ve been really helpful.”
Concerned about AI tools used at your college? See a promising application underway? We want to hear from you: Email taylor.swaak@chronicle.com.