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A mouse on a tree was created by AI.


the issues and allowing them to formu- late responses”. He has some sympathy for calls for a hiatus on the technology, but admits it is not practical and also questions the motives of some of those who signed an open letter recently. Many have a vested interest in slowing development down as they look to play ‘catch up’. However, for users the idea of time to get to grips with the technology would be immensely valuable. “The problem is everything is moving so fast, and this is why a six month hiatus could be important, if we could stop and reflect on where we are – but that is probably not desirable in practice,” Mark says. “There is an issue with the speed of implementation. In a university setting it means the process of formu- lating policy is being left behind by the technology. Universities are still trying to formulate policy for ChatGPT 3.5, when ChatGPT 4 has already hit with expanded functionality. That is a wider societal problem with technology that is developing more quickly than our capacity to formulate policy or ethical framework standards related to it.” The key to getting to grips with new technology goes beyond the question of “what can it do”. There needs to be an understanding of what it can do for the organisation, what it can do for individ- uals in the organisation, and what steps need to be taken to ensure everyone un- derstands how to use it practically and ethically. Training will be a crucial part of implementing AI successfully, but before that can happen organisations need to look at their own needs. Mark, who is a sociologist and philosopher by training, says that it is this intersection between technology and wider organisational, cultural and societal needs that is often hardest to pin down.


“My core interest is how we work 26 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL


purposefully with new technology,” Mark says. “New technologies often leave us confused as to how we might use them. We start adapting what we do to meet the requirements that we perceive in the technology itself.”


The danger is that technology leads the user and so there needs to be a concerted effort to share learning and understand- ing. Mark says: “That conversation is urgent – the different professional groups that relate to knowledge are all going to have the nature of their work change because of these technologies. We need to have a collaborative and logical way of making sense of these changes and what it means for our work. If existing silos are entrenched because of this, rather than being broken down, that could be really bad. We wouldn’t get to grips with it collectively.”


Hype and technology often go hand in hand, and Mark points to the over-in- flated promises surrounding Crypto and Web 3.0 that have failed to materialise.


He questions whether broad AI tools will deliver on the hype, saying: “I’ve yet to find many practical uses that I can make of it in my actual day job – and I found that quite telling.


“As a working academic, I’m keen to incorporate it into my assessments and train my students on the digital literacy aspect of it, in terms of my day-to-day work and practice it is not that useful for me. If other people are having that same experience, then that is something of a check on the hype surrounding it.” He feels that there are areas where it will be useful – particularly in content generation and creative industries. He is also quick to point out that “I’m inher- ently sceptical of anyone who confidently forecasts where this will be in the next five years. Technologists might be able to make forecasts about the technology, but it is the interplay between the social, political, economic factors and the tech- nology that is fiendishly complex.” This moves the conversation away from “how can we use the technology”, to a theme of “how do we mitigate its effects?” Like any new technology, training and understanding are key pillars. Mark looks at digital literacy and the need for those teaching curricula to encompass AI. Not just in how it is used, but also how it works.


“The field of AI Literacy that has been developed over the last few years is criti- cal. There is lots of conceptual, education- al and practical work being done about what it means to have an AI system and how you use that – how it can be taught, measured, and rolled out. These are the conversations that are taking place in universities – what is the baseline level of understanding we need for staff and students.


An AI generated Pope Francis I.


“Universities have an important role to play there because students leave univer- sity and then they exist in wider society.


April-May 2023


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