Mark Carrigan.
interface, and generative AI suddenly becomes a much broader tool – and one that has captured the public’s attention. Mark explains his own interest in it came professionally, but like many other users who ‘played’ with it he soon found his personal interest piqued as well, saying: “I was very concerned that our students might be using paraphrasing software – and the question of how, if at all, we could know they were using it. Through that process of investigating paraphrasing software, I started to get interested in generative AI and it was around this time that Open AI launched ChatGPT. It felt like I was just starting to get to grips with one big problem, when another much bigger problem started to hit the scene.
“As well as that, I was playing around with image generation software. In my non-academic career, I worked in social media for quite a long time as a strategist and consultant, so I had this interest in content generation and it was clear that it was going to have a big impact on how social media would work.
“When ChatGPT came out, as soon as I started playing with it I was hooked.” And Mark recommends that everyone starts ‘playing with’ Generative AI tools as soon as possible, saying: “‘Playing’ is not the most professional sounding term, but I think it is important to play or tinker with new technology. It’s open-ended experimentation and it gives you a chance to explore its capa- bilities and refl ect on what they might mean for your sphere of activity. “One of the things that fascinates me about ChatGPT and comparable systems is how broad the functionality is. The range of ways they could have an impact on existing practice is very diffi cult to articulate at the moment. “So, when you are ‘playing’, you start
April-May 2023
to get a sense of what it can do – where it is strong and where it is less convinc- ing. For refl ective practice, with any digital tools, we have to have a sense of its capabilities. Ideally, we have to come to that sense in our own terms. The kind of things you are inclined to ask as an individual are very important in learning to use it and I’m a big advocate of just get- ting on with it and trying to fi nd out what it can do for you.”
Having said that, the potential impact of these systems means that there needs to be an organisational approach, as well as a broader collaborative approach, saying: “It’s worth having formalised discussions about how we use them. The multi-pur- pose character of ChatGPT means it could
touch on almost any aspect of existing practice that involves text. We need a way of negotiating the range of impacts that emerge from that and start to have more fruitful discussions.
“There is an analogy with how the role of learning technologists changed during the pandemic into a role that involved greater collaboration in teams. I wonder if we need more proximity between academics, learning technologists, learning designers and information professionals in universi- ties. Those collaborations already happen, but we need a new depth of collaboration to emerge.”
Mark also sees value in “collating the resources that are emerging in these debates, helping everyone make sense of
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