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Arizona State using AI to chop up and repackage faculty lectures

Bizarre and pretty outrageous:

Arizona State University rolled out a platform called Atomic that creates AI-generated modules based on lectures taken from ASU faculty by cutting long videos down to very short clips then generating text and sections based on those clips. 

Faculty and scholars I spoke to whose lectures are included in Atomic are disturbed by their lectures being used in this way—as out-of-context, extremely short clips in some cases—and several said they felt blindsided or angered by the launch. Most say they weren’t notified by the school and found out through word of mouth. And the testing I and others did on Atomic showed academically weak and even inaccurate content. Not only did ASU allegedly not communicate to its academic community that their lectures would be spliced up and cannibalized by an AI platform, but the resulting modules are just bad. 

Is this happening elsewhere?

(Thanks to Bennett Gilbert for the pointer.)

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One response to “Arizona State using AI to chop up and repackage faculty lectures”

  1. I don’t know how widespread this *behavior* is, but I know that the legal basis for allowing it to happen is spreading. Faculty need to be aware of their university’s policies regarding ownership of course materials they create—especially materials posted in online learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard, etc.). Some universities or public university systems having been trying to change their policies so that course materials created by faculty working for those universities automatically become the university’s property, to be used as the university sees fit, often without notifying the content’s creators.

    A good place to start on this issue is the AAUP’s statement on intellectual property and copyright:
    https://www.aaup.org/issues-higher-education/teaching-and-research/intellectual-property-and-copyright

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