Steven Brown is an associate professor of teaching in the Department of Philosophy specializing in ethics. He received Ohio State's Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2023. He earned his PhD from Ohio State in 2012.
What made you want to start using AI in your course?
AI is here to stay. I believe we will continue to see steady and perhaps even exponential progress over the coming years and decades. While I understand why some instructors are banning AI, I personally believe this is a shortsighted strategy. We need to be preparing our students for the new world that is rapidly emerging: teaching them how to learn, work and be creative in ways that enhance the human experience rather than infantilizing us.
Can you share specifics on how you have students use it?
I have encouraged students to have lengthy discussions with AI chatbots about how the topics we cover in class are related to other things they care about. I then encourage them to write papers using AI however they’d like. I have had many students report that this exercise was unexpectedly fun and some of the papers I received were quite clever and thoughtful.
I’ve encouraged them to use AI to help construct Platonic dialogs between two fictional parties who represent both sides of a controversial issue to help them understand how intelligent and thoughtful parties might disagree about that issue.
What were you hoping students would get out of it?
In all honesty, I had very little idea what they would get out of it. I told them from the very beginning that I didn’t know how well this would work and we were going to break things in order to learn more about what AI means to us. I suppose I hoped that they would help me in the task of discovery and that worked out marvelously well.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned since starting to teach with AI? Have there been any surprises?
Even over the past couple of years, AI has improved dramatically. The kind of interactions that students had when I first started pale in comparison to what can be done now. Even I have been surprised by how rapidly things have improved. OpenAI’s Deep Research feature truly blew my mind when I asked it an extremely detailed question about comparative theology regarding the doctrine of incarnation in Christianity and how it related to the doctrine of avatars in Hinduism. Five minutes later, it output a 27-page paper that answered all the questions I asked it. This is the kind of thing I would only assign to a graduate student fluent in ancient Greek and Sanskrit. It was astounding.
Is there a moment when you realized AI was actually working better than you expected in your class? What happened?
When a student walked up to me after turning in the first batch of AI-assisted papers and thanked me for such a fun assignment. And then when I graded them and found a lot of really creative ideas. My favorite one is still a paper on karma and the practice of returning shopping carts.
Some people are nervous about AI, thinking it might hold students back from developing critical thinking or creativity. What’s your take on that?
Used poorly, I completely agree. Personally, I believe that we still need to find ways to motivate them to actually study and produce some kind of work that is graded on content. For me, I have returned to the use of timed, hand-written exams. I’ve also experimented a bit with one-on-one oral exams. But this is no reason to ban AI, it’s just a reason to find clever and helpful ways of using AI to spark curiosity and independent exploration of things that really matter to the students.
Will embedding AI in the curriculum actually help students prepare for their careers after graduation?
Of course. It would be a disaster for our students to have no idea how to effectively use one of the most powerful tools that humanity has ever created. AI is such a powerful tool for self-education, that we must rapidly adapt our pedagogy or be left in the dust.