Boyle42 · "A Quarter Cup of Glue and a Crisis of Knowing"

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Episode Description

In this episode, Matt from the Rosemary B. Fuss Teaching and Learning Center is joined by TLC Faculty Fellow and Professor of Communication Kurt Wirth. We discuss artificial intelligence, information literacy, and what it means to teach and learn these days.

Topics include:

What is writing as a mode of learning now?
The AI-glue pizza problem. (Bad data citing bad data citing bad data.)
Mentorship, "mentorship," and hallucinations
How to teach students to question filters optimized for engagement, not accuracy.

Show Notes

Additional links and resources mentioned in (or related to) the episode:

Articles Referenced

The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking
The study Matt referenced. 319 knowledge workers self-reporting findings. Basically, higher trust in AI correlates with less critical thinking. Higher self-confidence leads to more.
Google AI Said to Put Glue in Pizza
Reddit thread with much amusement and reflection on AI's difficulty at understanding pranks and satire like this one.
ELIZA: a very basic Rogerian psychotherapist chatbot
Includes several of the articles Sophie referenced. An excellent dive into the ethics of its electricity consumption, plagiaristic impulses, privacy concerns, and overall usefulness.

Text Transcript

This transcript was generated from automatic speech recognition. Matt apologizes for transcription errors and promises to edit it to improve (posted 5/15/2025).

Introduction

Matt Boyle: Hello, everybody. Welcome back. I'm here today with the assistant professor communication here at Lasell and TLC faculty fellow, Kurt Wirth. Welcome, Kurt.

Kurt Wirth: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Matt: Yeah, well, thanks for being here. So the conversation we were hoping to have today was about artificial intelligence at its place right now in the academy for things as wide ranging as information literacy and the demonstrations of learning and things like workforce development and the needs of the market as a whole. So it's sort of a check and a pulse take on all of those particular topics. And we were also hoping to sort of rundown what happened in spring 2025, some of the things, some of the highlights of your workshop series, Kurt, and some of the things that we all discovered as we went along.

Modes of Learning in the Age of AI

Matt: So, without further ado, I do have a question I wanted to start out with this one that I come to because I am, by training and by background, a writing instructor. And it feels like for a long time writing has had a good it has been looked upon as a default method of demonstrating learning. "Write me an essay. Write me a series of short responses." Now that is a humanities influence perspective, right? There are plenty of classes wherein that is not the primary method of demonstrating learning. However, writing across the curriculum is definitely a thing. And I guess that brings me to a question. Now that artificial intelligence exists as something that can produce writing very quickly, at at least a moderate level of competency, what should count as a legitimate demonstration of learning in 2025? And who is who's going to decide?

Kurt: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really good question. Um, and what I said to you right before we started was like, I think we're going to end up with a lot of, "I don't know." I think we'd be really rich if we had answers to these questions. I think that one in particular is really important for us. Um, I, I would say even in something like so I teach marketing communications, and even in my field, writing is such a fundamental part of it. Right. And I think that even things like writing, you know, reports on your under labs in the sciences and there's so much writing involved and like the all of our fields that, um, when something can be done quickly for us, whether that's for better or for worse, sometimes it's not accurate. Like what? How do we measure, um, what does knowing look like?

And I think in a lot of cases, we as a university build our education around the professional world, and the professional world is just getting thrown on its head right now. So of course we're getting thrown on our head. So what does being a successful professional look like even right? I've had a number of people sort of take exception with this idea and very legitimate ways. But the analogy that I think roughly draw is, is that of a calculator and how, um, the calculator helped us sort of like do the manual labor of calculation quickly so we can move on to sort of higher order stuff. Obviously, implications are much bigger than that. But like, should we be looking at the higher level application of calculus or should we still care about the sort of the grammar or to say, um, you know, that, like, manual math work? So. Yeah, I'm not sure. Um, it's a tough question.

Matt: Yeah, it's a reasonable one. And it feels like technologies move the goalposts in a lot of ways. I suppose what comes to my mind when I think about it is right. Even in my own skill, I used to be able to write cursive very well, and after a while I was like, I don't really want to do this anymore, I'm just going to print. And then I kind of forgot how to do cursive. And then I hear people say, you know, kids don't know how to do cursive these days. And I'm like, "okay, does that matter?" And, it's sort of like, but it was so pretty. It's like it's less accessible, harder. I mean, who cares? Um, but yeah, I suppose there's a certain elegance there. And anybody who here is a handwriting teacher is probably coming after me now and say, "how dare you say such a thing?" But, as a skill. Yeah. Yes. It does make you rethink fundamentally what it is you are actually learning. What can you automate? And now therefore, move your own goalpost towards learning something that demonstrates knowledge even more?

I think the concern that I have is whether or not this kind of thing is going to undermine cognition. There certainly have been studies done, and I'll include one. This things show notes about individuals who have expertise within specific areas, who know what they don't know, have been benefited by having artificial intelligence as a rubber duck. You know, you ask it questions, you use it as your gopher. You say, "what do you think about this? What do you think about this?" Very useful because you are getting that kind of feedback in real time and, um, you can use it to improve. And you know what you don't know, and you know where to use creative discernment. But the studies were finding that students who did not have that level are sort of stuck in a Dunning-Kruger effect, um, circle of not knowing what they didn't know and therefore becoming paradoxically more confident in what they didn't know. And I worry about a cycle of, um, not knowing, spinning out of control and a vicious cycle of sorts.

I got a little bit away from modes of learning, I suppose, but it's connected to it still, because it informs what we use in class. Because you say, I'm going to assign an essay. Is that an authentic form of learning right now? Are there other ways they can do it? Um, I guess I worry about it both from a cheating perspective. Like, "hey, they're not writing the way they're 'supposed' to write." But I also worry about it from their perspective of what have they lost by not engaging with writing? What kinds of skills? Iterative skills, cognitive skills are they losing by not engaging the process? Or is there some other way to engage with that same process?

Kurt: Yeah. I mean, I think we're touching on the difference in my analogy. Right. So that's where sort of this is where the calculator analogy breaks down, because you can't just go to a calculator and say, "hey, I want to do math." And then it just like produce stuff, whether it is real math or not. And that's really the problem because with AI, response is like part of why we've used writing for so long is that it's either that or it's spoken. There have been a very limited number of ways for people to show that they know something, regardless of whether it's an education. Um, and, and in writing, like, if you, if you say like, hey, I want you to write this paper for me, it's not just, you could say, format this paper for me, but you could also say, write this paper for me. And that's a substantive change from from calculators.

What Are We Preparing Students For (plus, brief appearance of a spider)

But again, I think I want to go back to like the, the professional sector. It's like at the end of the day, even, you know, I'm biased. I work at Lasell. I am Kurt, but I think that education in general should be professional focused, right? Um, like like we need researchers for sure. Um, but that is a profession as well, right? Like we should be. The whole point is to, I think, twofold really build well, and this is something you sort of touched on when you were talking about build like, well adjusted human beings and also set them up for a successful life. And, um, and what does a successful life look like when you have AI promising to do almost everything. I'm being dramatic but like a lot of things for a lot of people and a lot of fields, how do we now we're in a position where we have to predict what that looks like and then try to train people for it? Um, and I think that work in five years, going to have a better feel for what that looks like. But right now we're just having to sort of like ask these questions and have podcast and then talk in an open minded kind of way.

Matt: Yeah, I appreciate it. And yes, I definitely agree that that seems to be where we are in a lot of cases. I do disagree but not hugely with the perspective on the professional angle. But that's like I said earlier, this is humanities coming at you. I would say the lodestar should be well-adjusted human beings, and that well-adjusted human beings are individuals who are well informed to have the ability of creative discernment, and that that should be the primary goal. And that one of the sub goals of that is that individuals will have a successful professional career, because they will have been informed in that. I worry about the tail wagging the dog in the form of the needs of the market, you know, becoming a training center for the next big thing in artificial intelligence, you know, to come to here and learn the skill that maybe six months from now will no longer be valid.

And I honestly, it's my own experience, and this is anecdotal, but using artificial intelligence, I get the most out of it. Not by doing as you were saying, "write me this thing," and I've certainly tested it out to see what it would do, because whatever it produces is always sort of competently not good enough, but using it as an iterative, um, focused tool of "what do you think about this? Here's the context that I'd like you to consider. Here's the role I'd like you to play. Give me feedback from that perspective, then give me suggestions focused here." It can be a great iterative tool. I'm starting to look at it more like a really supercharged pencil rather than a calculator. Basically it helps, right? Or helps perform specific tasks very well. But when I try to get a do the Global thing, right? Me? The essay, the results are always, um, underwhelming. You could use that essay as a skeleton, as, um, a outline of sorts. Um, and that's useful. But then you need to fill in those blanks.

I'm sorry I got away from the needs of the market thing and got into talking about the use case of artificial intelligence as a whole. But that's sort of my thinking. Whenever individuals, you know, talk about how we need to be thinking about how to prepare students for professional futures, and my worry is that we can get stuck on the hype of vaporware, um, prepare your students for this super thing that they need to know how to do. And it still feels to me like what they need to know how to do is what they've always needed to know how to do, which is what the Academy teaches.

Kurt: To be clear, what I'm what I'm saying here is not, um, we should prepare them for the professional world and thus rely entirely on AI or something like, or any given tool. That's not at all what I'm saying. I'm saying I think, um...

Hello, spider. Go away. Ah. Two seconds.

Matt: This is the exciting part of the podcast where Kurt is attacked by a spider.

Kurt: Yeah, this is how Kurt handles spiders.

Matt: Yeah, we can make everyone imagine that it's a giant spider since this is an audio-based medium.

Kurt: Yeah, it was a couple feet wide, at least.

And, in any case, I do think that preparing them for the rest of their lives, whatever that...and that's really where those two goals merge. It's just like preparing people for the rest of their lives. And I and I agree with you. I think that -- um, so okay, so a couple of things a couple points that you brought up that I wanted to respond to. One is that we just published the I newsletter for April, and when we were sort of like,
um, I got your feedback and it was really good feedback and it sort of got me thinking. And I think that is a bigger concern than I had had considered before, which is that, like, if we have these tools that are revolutionizing, for better or for worse, I think that's a fair word the professional world and that's education. Um, the tools that are primarily being used that are run by, you know, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman. Right. We have like three maybe that are like really heavily used.

Um, and, and those companies are and as we've seen, actively recruiting young people, um, and through the education outreach. And I think that was a really important observation because we've seen that happen in social media. And then we saw, I think, you know, I teach social media. We've seen some good effects from social media. We've also seen a lot of societal disruption. Um, and I think there's pretty little doubt that that's going to happen from AI. And I think and we are in this like really soft spot in our culture where we have an opportunity, um, especially in education, to take to predict what's going to happen and then try to control for it in a way to, for example, to produce human beings that like, want to use a tool via critical thinking, um, rather than creating almost like a two class system where you have because I know that the study that referencing and saw that same thing where we have some people that like, get stuck, just like people get stuck in media systems right now and like low information, um, and then like dangerously persuasive media systems.

Now that very same thing could happen with AI, right. And that so that study suggested that that could happen.

So I think that there's that part. And then, um, I was taking notes as you're writing. I don't remember my second one. Um, but yeah, I think that it definitely has the potential to create that sort of, um, two prong system. And so then it just it's like, how do we I think the challenge for us now is like producing students and people that, of course, are happy and healthy, that know what technologies are out there, but especially in the South. Right, because we are actually focused, um, what technologies are out there, how to use them both effectively and also not ruin their lives with it.

Matt: That is an important thing, right? We should change the thing. Our goal is the academy: "prepare individuals for the future and not ruin their lives."

Kurt: And I think we'd get a lot more students, frankly.

Matt: Yeah, well, you know, if you're up front about it, "you will not ruin your life by coming to this place, it will change the way you approach it." And it reminds me of a meme where they said in the meme somewhere, uh, these bananas. Definitely no spiders, right? And then someone has captioned it, "that is exactly the thing someone would say that knows there are a lot of spiders in it."

Information Literacy in a Misinformation Age

Kurt: Yeah, yeah. Um, so then and then, you know, another question that we had talked about, um, that feel sort of related to this is that we were talking about Writing because we did -- I don't know that we touched that topic super well. And partially because I don't know what the answer is, what could possibly be. But if writing isn't a super good, or it may or may not forever be the sort of like primary way to exhibit, um, sort of knowledge or something. What I want us as a society and as a school to do is to not assume that any technology will not change. And AI has changed so much in the last couple of years.
Um, so, for example, if you right now, if we were to say, um, write me a paper on the history of the Roman Empire. It's going to give you, as you mentioned, half gobbledygook, that like fluffy language that may or may not be made up, some facts in there. Like, it'll do a decent job if you want if you're like trying to research on your own. Certainly not good enough for, for academia, but in say, 2 or 3 years. Who's to say that AI won't say "okay, cool. What context is this for" and like and then pull really good resources and be able to do that for you? I'm not sure that we can assume that that won't be the case.

And in fact, I kind of assume it will be the case. I is going to get better. And one of the needs that we have is for it to stop hallucinating and to come up with really good sources. Um, and that's some of the largest things that they have. We've got billionaires that are trying to fix that. I don't think that it won't get fixed. So if it does get fixed, then what? Like what? What? And begs one of our questions like what is even? And I mean this in a way that there absolutely obviously is value. But we need to find the value of education in a world where, especially in some amount of future, presumably I will be able to just like here is the information, you know, and it's it's triple checked and it's got good sources and like what does education look like there.

Matt: Well, I guess we're talking about the world of instant information and what education offers in there when AI exists. When you could just have a bot give you the history of the Roman Empire and just tweak it based on knowledge. And I suppose the, from my perspective, what it is, is the creative discernment which is most important. Like we already live in a world where and you could very quickly get the history of the Roman Empire, right? And I'm sure ChatGPT is already offering individuals free accounts. Right? They're trying to get them become users. They have these deep research modes that could do those things that can do much better than they have done in the past. And, um, I suppose at the same time, what concerns me is the fact that, um, this is more of a sort of philosophical portion of it, but it does have a practical component...

Information changes based upon previous information. It becomes a game of telephone with previous versions of the past. So this is recent example of it wherein person is using Google to search for something and they embed a premise into a question which is silly. And the premises hey, how much glue do you put on the pizza? Right. So the Google summary, because of course there's that summary at the top of every Google search now says, oh, well, a quarter of a cup. It helps with the consistency of the cheese. You know, perfect hallucination kind of thing. Ridiculous. Everyone reads it and rolls their eyes. Hopefully no one tries to do it, but you know, you never know with the Darwin awards is of this world. But probably no one is going to do that in alone.

Kurt: In a world of iPods, I don't know.

Matt: Okay, a week after that, maybe a month after that, a person decides to do it again. They say how much g or how much glue goes on the pizza. And the AI says, according to a Business Insider article, you should put a quarter of a cup of glue on to pizza. And now it's citing an article which cites the very original. It was basically an article written about the original screw up, and it has turned into this ouroboros of vicious circle, bad data, chasing bad data, chasing bad data. And that's the old garbage in, garbage out conversation. But it's a ridiculous version of that. There are any number of "When did you start beating your wife?" questions that exist out there, ones where you load in a premise of assumption about the way the world works, that can make you erase entire perspectives, entire people. And that, to get back to your original question, is what I think higher education is. Goal is creative discernment of the knowledge.

Because if you have a tool that can instantly get knowledge, the question then becomes, what questions are you asking of that tool? Are you asking questions like how much glue should we put on a pizza? Probably not that dumb, but are you asking questions that skip past a whole host of things, a whole host of assumptions? And I don't know. We live in a world of lots of information already, and it's like.
Khanmigo. Why do we need education? You can just go on to YouTube and get anything you want. Learn from there. You need somebody who can guide you through these things. Um, that's my initial stab at an answer, if that's helpful.

Kurt: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, I think this is something I've been saying from the beginning. Um, stepping into this role is that I think we we have to focus on what makes us human.
And I think one of those things is, um, like a critical thinking. I think that one might perceive something like whatever you want to call it, AGI or whatever, but something that is genuinely able to critically think, I think we're very far from that. Um, and, you know, at that point, older Kurt will reassess his assumptions. But as of now, I think I think you're right. I think being able to like, take the tools just and this is again, we're dumbing down this analogy. Um, it's it's such a bad analogy, but the calculator analogy, um, like, you can't just give like someone who doesn't know math a calculator and be like, do math. They still have to like, understand the concepts of what they need to know to use the tool. And so maybe that's where that analogy finds its strength. But I think that asking the right questions, becoming and who you become, right?

Like AI is not going to help mentor you in a way that, um, is, is at least human. I will say it's quite good...I want to be careful because weirdly, it can mentor you, but in turn, you know, and I don't know, I it's it's such an open question. Right? Because, for example, I know, um, certain members of the leadership team, like they, they do. Absolutely. They turn to it for, for mentorship. And that's a good at mentorship. Um, but like in terms of someone who is young and doesn't know a lot about the world, um, to your point, right. Like these, these systems are designed ultimately -- and I know that you know this, but maybe a lot of our viewers don't -- the way that I especially LLMs work is that it is making a prediction every time it produces a letter. It's trying to say what might be the next letter, what might be the next letter, what might be the next, whatever character. And in doing so and it has to have some sort of outcome. And that outcome isn't rightness. It isn't, um, necessarily accuracy. They're trying to build accuracy into it, but it's really what will keep the user engaged. What what will make the user continue to use the tool.

And so what we have now, just like we had with social media, which again, very powerful tool, but it went off the rails in large part because we have we had like to and then eventually more than that very rich people making and then maybe a team of however many engineers deciding what that algorithm in this case, what this sort of prediction outcome is going to be. And so not only do we, we risk people falling into that same, um, information bubble like they did in social media, which is pretty rampant right now. Um, we also have these like very powerful people. That and so going back to like, um, and um, off the rails, but going back to the Roman Empire thing. Right? It's like I will retract my statement a little bit. I actually cannot perceive of an AI that will, at any point in the future, be able to authentically write that article. Um, insofar as it is unbiased, because it has designers, it has engineers, and there is a point of view, even if that point of view is your own point of view, because it's trying to make you happy. And that I don't think we're going to get away from because that's the economy.

Matt: Well, I agree with you tremendously in a number of ways because bias will get into it based upon whoever is preparing it. And I don't think that, um -- like your question about, um, your hypothetical about the Roman Empire No one can do it in an unbiased way -- I mean, there are variations on that that are very practical right now. Deepseek will not talk about Tiananmen Square. That didn't happen.

Kurt: Yeah. Um, so, like the history of the. Sorry, the history of the Roman Empire, it's like, maybe it talks about the architecture, maybe it talks about the leadership, maybe it talks about uprisings, maybe it talks about the invasions. Like all of those are different and what it does not talk about. And when it does talk about, it's like, yeah, that's a choice.

Mentorship and "Mentorship" in an Age of AI

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. But it brings us back to the question of, , you mentioned mentorship earlier on. Yeah, I agree with you. I've seen examples of individuals have used it in fascinating ways. It's like the ELIZ-A. A person created a bot that very simply just echoed, mirrored what you said. You go in and you say, um, a woman said, "I don't like it when my boyfriend ignores me." And um, then the bot says, "I hear you're talking about your boyfriend and feeling unheard. Can you tell me more about that?" And it just did that over and over again. Just. And back and forth. It didn't actually "hear" her. It's not interacting with them. It is just grabbing keywords from which he said and turning it around into a viable enough response.

But this is helpful to users. They find this useful, and they seem to know that it's not talking to an individual. It basically is an infrastructure for talking to yourself. So I don't think it's mentorship in the classic sense of an external person. I think it's going into an anonymous ChatGPT conversation and asking a question that you would never feel comfortable asking a person. And that's weird because you're sharing it with OpenAI and you're like, "oh, this is private." And sure, there are private chats. But it's strange because the anonymity of it makes you feel like you can be honest in surprising ways. And then it is kind of mentorship. It's you mentoring yourself based upon the prompts you choose and the corpus of knowledge that the AI has. I mean, I tried this out and about halfway through I thought "Am I just talking to myself here?" And based upon what I've told you to sort of say, I kind of know already what you're going to "Say." And the bot's like, "yeah, that's true." You know, it was a very strange conversation.

Kurt: Very meta.

Matt: But yes, when you get into it, though, what you mentioned about social media concerns me because it did empower extremism. And this sounds like the engagement thing, finishing every prompt in an AI conversation with a question that makes you feel like you have to thank it. You have to respond, right? Recently, someone shared a funny little article saying millions of dollars loss just by saying please and thank you to bots. But the bots are polite. They were built to be user friendly. They were built to make us want to say thank you, and there and built that way for engagement. To ask a question, "would you like this? Would you like this? Do you want to keep on engaging?" It feels like even more bespoke versions of extremism could be the watchword. They're individuals mentoring themselves in harmful ways.

Kurt: And, yeah, you can see you can definitely see, like, information bubbles getting more severe. Um, and the and and my main concern is that, like, the only thing to keep those information bubbles from becoming that way are like three very rich, straight white men.

Yeah. So that's concerning. And also on the mentor topic, um, to go back to that, um, I came up with, I think what is the key difference? And that is a psychologist versus a mentor, a psychologist, you like, have an appointment and you go to your psychologist for some sort of goal. It could be self-growth. It could be treatment. It could be whatever. But you have like a goal in mind. And I wouldn't say they are a tool, but they are a means to an end, generally speaking. Right. Um, whereas there is some sort of goal that you have, you go to. You go to a doctor, you go to whatever. Whereas, um, mentorship is not that you don't just like a mentor is, is like, um, me going to one of the groups in my class and, um, seeing what they produced and saying, "I've seen better from y'all. I really need y'all to step up, because in the professional world, this is what it takes. And like, you got to watch X, Y, and Z. Like, I know that you can do this because of x, y this I see your growth. I need you to push harder." Like that's that's mentorship. And I think that's the key for humans. Right.

But like I, you know, ideally I think probably not in our lifetimes is not gonna get to the point where it's all around us all the time in mentoring us. I think that, like, the human connection is such a crucial part of both education, um, and the professional world and whether it be mentorship or not. And I think that's, that's like the heart of the difference. Mhm. Yeah. With the writing. Right. With writing I can like I'm a big I'm huge. My students um can't stand it. I diagnosed OCD and, and one of the superpowers it gives me is I will find every single imperfection every single one. Um I just I can't not see it. And so I hammer my students for. I mean by hammer, I mean I hammer the topic of of writing. You really have to, like, get those details. Um, and, and I can see their growth over time and I can like, um, encourage them. And I sort of like a face to face way, um, that I think would be very difficult to do.

How Do You Teacher Learners to Question the Filter?

Matt: I agree and I think that brings us to the not end, but we've talked about it a little already, and I think it's a good sort of question. Because if AI can be a therapist or a mentor or a filter for student research or student learning, How do you teach students to question the filter? That's the question. You've said the filter is been engineered by three straight white guys who basically are doing it for the purposes of engagement and making money, and not necessarily even though there might be overlap for the goal of helping you grow and live as a happy individual, a successful individual. Um, it's why I'm so concerned about stuff like, you know, get a free ChatGPT account until May 31st, you know, get a free Gemini account until such and such a date at the exact time when students are stressing over ,
um, exams, is so very cynical and using them as a focus group, people to be used is, um, yeah, I suppose it could overlap with helping people, but I'm digressing. I guess that becomes the question, and maybe we've already answered it to the best of our ability right now, as it becomes increasingly a filter for how students research the world and learn about the Roman Empire or about whatever empire. How do you teach individuals to question the filter itself?

Kurt: Yeah, yeah, it's going to come down to critical thinking. I mean, in any field, I think that we have to teach independent thinking. And I think that goes back to this, like what makes us human. I think that we're going to have to we're gonna have to teach that, um, you know, I've been advocating for a while that I think that, you know, ideally, I think, every Lasell student, or at least many, need a course, an AI basics, um, both how to use it, period. Because while the number is increasing, still roughly about half of my class is not used at very heavily before, when I ask how to use it. How do use it like that as a tool, but also how to use it to, to like help yourself in that like critical thinking piece, like, what is it good for? What is it not good for? Why would we care? Teach the theory and and that theory. Teach the sort of behind the scenes -- like look, you got a very few people in power that that have very specific goals with these tools, and they can be very powerful. But you have to, you know, all of the things we've talked about today, I think that like, it needs to be taught, and I think it needs to be taught in a way that is both productive and critical. And that's a really, really difficult balance to strike.

Matt: Yes, it is, and I'll agree with you, I suppose, in a reserved way, because I think we need to teach the wariness and the skepticism more than the tool. But the tool comes along with the teaching of the awareness to the skepticism and the teaching of critical thinking. So I don't think the two things need to be mutually exclusive.

Kurt: No, I'm explicitly saying the opposite. I'm saying that I think I think there needs to be ideally a course, um, that's controlled by experts rather than it sort of being dispersed to a bunch of people that may or may not have a good firm grasp of AI, that where both things are taught at the same time? Yeah, absolutely.

Matt: Maybe we'll see what unfolds.

Kurt: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Parting piece of advice I have to those of you who are watching got this far. Use new tools, keep a wary eye as to what they are and what they can do, but also don't look into what is now -- and be thinking, what is the world going to look like in five years, both for yourself and how you use it and how you don't use it. Um, as well as like how you're teaching it.

Matt: Yeah, that's a great advice. Would you like to rundown some of the stuff you went over this semester in the workshop series, maybe talk a little bit more about what you're envisioning doing in the future?

Kurt: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Um, I mean, workshops were super fun. Um, the people that showed up or super engaged, um, a really nice breadth of experience levels. We really I kept the workshops very explicitly, um, about just practicality, how to use it and how not to use it, um, and ways in which it can, like, make your life easier. Um, so that's really what that the workshops specifically are about. Um, as well as um, hopefully the, those the newsletters. I definitely expect those to continue, but I really wanna spend some time this summer, um, like looking for conferences to be a part of and that sort of thing and get more into, um, the sort of like talk circuit and then-- and because one of the things that I've struggled with is bridging the gap between my and I feel like you as well, there are a handful of people in the university, just like on the internet. We, um, we like, get those articles in our Google feed or whatever it is, and we kind of know what's going on.

And bridging the gap between that and like, helping the university find its vision and trying to stay ahead of other universities with a very limited budget. Um, and it's just a really tough balancing act. And I'm hoping to get a lot more perspective on that, and then bring those to those works on workshops next semester rather than than being just like, "here's a tool to use, you know." So that's sort of the goal for now at least.

This is super fun. I feel like just like we have a place for -- like we have a place for literal using the tool and how to use it. I think we definitely need a place like this, like, talk about bigger topics and to be able to share that conversation. You know, I almost wonder if we, like, stagger them or something. We have one that's more just like open ended. Let's talk about your concerns and stuff. And then one that's like, here are some tools to use. Whatever.

Matt: Yeah, I think that makes sense. And um, for podcasts like this, I think it'd be good to sort of try and recruit WLAS, bring students into that conversation. They're the ones going to be learning to use the tool either.

Kurt: I mean, I've had a vision for a while of being a part of a, like, um, student/faculty podcast, like it's published to Spotify because that's such a great experience for the students, and it would be an opportunity to, like I would listen to that podcast if it was like students and faculty talking about these, like, big esoteric questions. I think that could be really, really interesting and exciting.

Matt: Yeah, I think that would uncover a lot, because if you had a writing instructor in the weeds saying, we're doing this assignment and the students saying, can I use AI here? And then they just work through that one use case that can be very practical and useful in a way that can talk about, like the ecological impacts of using the AI in this way, the value of what it can tell you, the, , ways in which it can send you off base. And there would be a whole bunch of stuff people would learn there in ways that they can't with 1000 foot view. So I think that we were like, cool.

Kurt: Yeah. An easy and an easy thing to like, recruit with as well. Right. We say to prospective students and say like like we're on the leading edge of thought. Mhm. Awesome. Well um as always you know I yeah you've always been awesome and I really appreciate the support and I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this.

Matt: Well thank you very much for joining us, Professor Wirth, um, your insights have always been spectacular, insightful and helpful. And we are incredibly thankful to have you in this role. And, bye bye, everyone.