Reference and Instruction Librarian Atticus Garrison of Black Hawk College Library is working with faculty and students on the changing digital landscape, including generative artificial intelligence. According to Garrison, this is far from the first digital shakeup education has had to adapt to.
"So when the internet was new, public libraries were one of the bastions that would teach the basics of how to navigate the internet," Garrison said in an in-person interview with WVIK. "Same with Wikipedia and academic libraries. That kind of marked a tonal shift in how we would teach skills in the library."
During that time, educators were divided using Wikipedia. Garrison says the two camps of thought found a middle ground with Wikipedia, and Garrison believes the same will be true for artificial intelligence.
"We are seeing it everywhere now. And for many purposes, I don't think we're going to see A.I. everywhere for very long," Garrison said. "I think naturally over the course of the next maybe five years, we're going to see where A.I. works, where it doesn't work."
He started researching the abilities of artificial intelligence back in the spring of 2023 when news of ChatGPT worried educators. Garrison would work with the software to better understand the limitations of ChatGPT.
"...I started giving some talks to faculty at Black Hawk College in a version of what would become the talk that I would give to students, which is going over what ChatGPT is [and] how it works," Garrison said. "I would often... I would give talks about how they can kind of develop assignments and frame their syllabi in a way that ensures that the students are actually interacting with the course material."
The lessons went well enough that Garrison would later visit classrooms and teach students at Black Hawk College a similar method of identifying generative artificial intelligence.
Garrison says it's essential for students to understand the new digital endeavor as businesses are increasingly including generative A.I. in their products.
One recent example is the multi-national technology corporation Google.
"It would give kind of ludicrous hallucinations or preposterous responses. And I think over time, the hope is that that kind of stuff will be ironed out to a certain degree. But on the other hand, if you listen to anyone that works in the A.I. research field, it will always hallucinate," Garrison said. "The ability for A.I. to work and to create, you know, a different response every time you use it, is that variability, that probability that's involved in the output. So it will always make things up. It will always get things wrong, which is why I think it's really important to learn that on the front end to hopefully in that five years' time, we all kind of come to an understanding that much like with Wikipedia, there are uses for it. But maybe we don't rely on it wholesale to replace certain tasks, right? There are certain tasks that will always need human judgment."
With the increase of generative A.I. in businesses and just over 60 days until the 2024 presidential election, Garrison wants to bring his lesson to the community. He will host a talk on Tuesday, Sept. 3rd, at 6 p.m. at the Moline Public Library.
He says the lesson answers the basics of what A.I. is, how it works, what tools are available now and why social media is filled with it. Garrison also welcomes public comments and questions.
Garrison says a lot of social media content is synthetic media. As engagement rises with synthetic media, Silicon Valley companies are more incentivized to promote synthetic media higher than real human media, which can include disinformation.
An example Garrison gives is deep fakes of Joe Biden calling residents before the New Hampshire Democratic primary held earlier this year. According to Garrison, thirty seconds of audio or video is enough to capture someone's likeness and can be used to scam people.
"The internet, like you've pointed out, has always had disinformation. It's always had, there's always been scams. They're maybe more sophisticated now. The barrier to entry to conducting them is now lower. But at the end of the day, I remember when I was going through school, you were always told, don't believe everything you read on the internet, right? And a lot of those principles still hold true, even when that barrier to entry has gone down, even when the ability to make synthetic media is easier now than it ever has been," Garrison said.
Garrison will host another A.I. talk at the Rock Island Public Library on October 3rd, Thursday, at 6 p.m.
