"How have you encountered AI today? Perhaps you listened to music recommended by an AI algorithm, used a navigational app to check AI-predicted traffic conditions, auto-captioned videos with AI-powered voice recognition, or checked email without even noticing the AI-filtered spam messages. 

AI is shaping our everyday lives, but as anthropology teaching faculty, most of our recent AI-related conversations have had a singular focus: how to deal with generative AI tools like ChatGPT in the classroom. The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked panic among instructors who realized it can answer homework questions, analyze data, and generate whole essays in seconds (although its facts and citations may not always be trustworthy). Many faculty feared that AI would usher in a new age of student cheating that was faster, cheaper, and more difficult to detect than ever before.

This essay describes our attempt to work through the panic and turn our concerns into a learning opportunity. We engaged in a collaborative project based in the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) designed to explore how AI tools might support undergraduate learning in anthropology. Below, we present case studies from three anthropology courses using three different sets of AI tools. Christopher Lowman built a writing course for the era of ChatGPT, introducing anthropology majors to Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ability to prompt research topics and improve writing while teaching students to recognize AI’s limitations. Angela Jenks guided medical anthropology students through an analysis of direct-to-consumer artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) medical apps like Symptomate and DermAssist, teaching them to analyze this emerging technology while situating these apps in their historical, social, and economic contexts. Ian Straughn worked with students in an introductory archaeology course using Humata.ai to imagine and develop the research design for the archaeological investigation of UCI’s campus at some time in the future (perhaps an excavation to be conducted by non-human intelligence).

Together, these experiments contribute to ongoing conversations about the pedagogical value of AI tools, core competencies needed for AI literacy, and pedagogies that prepare students (and professors) to effectively, creatively, and ethically engage AI in the work of anthropology."  

Continue reading: https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/ai-for-learning-experiments-from-three-anthropology-classrooms/.