AI use is increasing at Ohio State, a companies are hosting pop ups for students. Credit: Courtesy of Lionel Bonaventure /AFP/Getty Images via TNS
OpenAI will host a campus pop-up event from Saturday to Nov. 8 to showcase artificial intelligence prompts made by students and discuss the broader ways students can use AI.
The event is made to spark positive conversations about how AI can support life and learning for the back-to-school season, Brianna Bower, a team member of OpenAI, said in an email.
The College of Arts and Sciences also held a summit for faculty and staff on Oct. 20-21 to discuss how to approach the use of AI in classrooms and in research, Phillip Howard, chief advancement officer for the College of Arts and Sciences, said.
“The question on the table is how will we prepare faculty and how will we prepare curricula to help our students be prepared for the world,” Howard said.
These events are part of a growing trend of AI-related events on campus.
According to the Artificial Intelligence at Ohio State website, Ohio State does not have a contract with OpenAI for the use of ChatGPT. Models like Microsoft Copilot, Good Gemini and Adobe Creative Cloud are all approved AI tools to use at the university, according to the website.
Since Ohio State released its AI fluency initiative, AI companies may be seeking opportunities to be part of it by partnering with the university, Shereen Agrawal, the inaugural executive director of the Center for Software Innovation, said.
“I think that has definitely been of interest to them to be part of our bold initiative [at Ohio State],” Agrawal said.
Bower said that OpenAI selected Ohio State as one of its first pop-up locations because of how students are already engaging with AI and the initiative.
“We’re visiting campuses like OSU to help learners get even more out of the tool,” Bower said.
Part of Ohio State’s goal with its AI partnerships is to ensure that students and faculty have a solid platform of tools that will help them with the study and research, Agrawal said.
“We want to ensure that it is a toolkit that is supportive of the endeavors for our university, for our students, for our faculty,” Agrawal said.
The university is constantly searching for types of technologies and AI models that will fulfill the needs of its students and faculty, Agrawal said.
Howard said that Ohio State’s growing interest in AI partnerships relates to how AI is reshaping education and the student learning experience.
“I’m excited that we’re thinking about AI because it has us examine some very fundamental questions about how humans work,” Howard said.
Nicholas Lusch, a first-year in computer information sciences, said that Ohio State’s increase in promoting AI learning may be due to the realization that the intelligence will continue to grow and be more widely used.
“I think OSU is deciding that it needs to incorporate AI if students are going to stay afloat in the future,” Lusch said.
Agrawal said that many AI companies are turning to Ohio State because of its extensive AI-related research and variety of majors.
With the size of the university and its breadth of fields of study, it is beneficial for AI companies to partner with Ohio State to continue to evolve and better their products, Agrawal said.
“We have a very unique place within Ohio State and within our ecosystem,” Agrawal said.
Lusch said that the university has plenty of valid reasons to educate students on how to use AI, but the AI corporations may be seeking a different goal.
The only mission AI companies seek in partnering with universities could be to grow and become more prevalent, Lush said.
“Maybe the initiative of their companies will eventually take precedence over the actual college’s goals with teaching AI, and that’s what I’d be worried about,” Lusch said.
