Reflections on the Counselors to Higher Education section of the Public Relations Society of America in Nashville, TN, Nov 2023

Date: January 9, 2024
Author: Dan Heck
Reading Time: 5 min 56 sec

Summary

Daniel Heck, TUG’s AI Ethicist, discusses the critical role of integrating artificial intelligence into higher education and its importance in setting the standard for how to do so ethically. Drawing on his insights from the recent Counselors to Higher Education Summit in Nashville, Daniel emphasizes the importance of authenticity, human agency, and building trust as cornerstones to integrating Artificial Intelligence into our work. Challenges and opportunities certainly exist when leveraging AI to enhance educational experiences. The focus, however, should be on leveraging AI to augment and enhance human understanding and interaction rather than to replace these human elements.

TUG’s Vision for Ethical AI Integration in Higher Education

Here at TUG, we hope to have a substantial and positive impact on the world by helping our partners understand and integrate artificial intelligence into their work in ethical ways, to achieve good goals. With this in mind, one of our primary areas of interest is helping communicators in higher education constructively leverage the intellectual and social resources they have to ensure AI is used responsibly.

For this reason, we were eager to share our work on generative AI with the Counselors to Higher Education section of the Public Relations Society of America in Nashville in October of 2023. We were deeply encouraged to hear the themes of authenticity, agency, and access emphasized throughout the conference because we believe that these are also some of the most central elements to consider if any organization wants to manage generative AI systems effectively and ethically.

Higher Education’s Pivotal Role in Shaping AI Systems and Ethics

Higher education institutions have played a central role in the development of AI systems and AI ethics and are likely to continue in this outsized role. Additionally, the social effects of today’s generative AI systems are clustered in ways that fundamentally impact both education and communications. Especially with the current roll-out of proprietary and open-source Large Multi-modal Models, people are using AI systems to rapidly automate the analysis and production of information in all forms, including text, visual, video, and audio.

Navigating the Challenges of AI Integration in Educational Institutions

The rapid development of these systems has already outpaced people’s capacity, including organizations’ capacity to understand and integrate them into their work. For these reasons, one of the primary bottlenecks surrounding using AI systems for good is the human capacity to analyze and internalize the significance of the technology. Higher education, in particular, and communications, more broadly, are especially crucial. If we as humans are going to understand and integrate these systems in ways aligned with our best and highest goals, higher education will be needed to combine the old, slow processes of expanding human understanding with these new and powerful systems.

Here are some of the key insights and principles that we were grateful to be able to expand on at the CHE Summit.

1. Being Authentic is More Important than Ever

The Counselors to Higher Education understand the centrality of authenticity and trust in communications and in forming communities. It was clear from the discussions that they know this to be the heartbeat of their work. As AI systems improve at making factual and ethical claims, one of the key areas that remains uniquely human is our ability to share authentically and understand our experiences. University communicators need to communicate widely about their universities and internally as a part of their vital role in nurturing student life. In each of these domains, in distinct ways, they need to be very careful to use AI to enhance authentic human communication instead of replacing it.

2. Elevate Human Agency to the Center of the Conversation

It is becoming increasingly common to describe these new AI systems as “agents” because they seem capable of pursuing their own agendas or goals. This style of goal-based training and programming is, in fact, one of the core features that the various forms of novel AI have in common. In light of this, it is increasingly essential to clarify what we mean by “human agency” and why it matters.

Part of our approach at TUG emphasizes that being a human agent involves having choices among good goals that we can understand. If we have more understanding of good goals that we can choose among, we can have and experience agency. This experience of agency has important ethical and psychological implications and is crucial for healthy human development and flourishing. It relates to our capacity to achieve positive outcomes for human flourishing, including health, well-being, social integration, and group cohesion. It is also important for avoiding negative outcomes. A core problem that constantly arises when considering AI agents is the threat that they will replace, and therefore undermine, our agency as human beings.

The Impact of AI on Higher Education Enrollment and Skills

For a long time, plenty of people have understood higher education as a means to expand their agency by giving them more choices among better careers. Institutions of higher education are facing enrollment declines that are substantially demographically driven, sometimes called the “enrollment cliff. It is possible that deskilling arising from generative AI will worsen this situation. After all, if students increasingly feel that the skills they might learn in college will quickly be rendered obsolete by generative AI, is it worthwhile to do all the hard work involved?

Balancing AI Advancements with Human Understanding in Academia

This is a challenging situation, and it is difficult to predict the social impacts of this technology. However, there are some ground truths that are relatively enduring and relevant here. For example, human agency depends on us understanding the choices we face as humans. Generative AI can help us understand, but the slow and effortful work of expanding our own experience of understanding also remains uniquely human and is an irreplaceable element of human thriving. Communicators working in higher education are positioned in an excellent way to help us use generative AI systems to expand our agency directly by expanding our understanding in ways that are equitable and inclusive. Increasing access to understanding anchors the Counselors to Higher Education’s work as ethical communicators. In a real and enduring sense, this is a necessary element of human agency, and this will remain true even as the world of work is transformed by generative AI.

3. Warranted Trust is the Key to Thriving Organizations

Another deeply encouraging idea that animates Counselors to Higher Education is their understanding that communication is not simply a matter of making the organization look good, even if it is behaving badly. Instead, communication is about building warranted trust, which can be understood as trust that we have good reasons to give. Warranted trust, as opposed to distrust or trust that shouldn’t be extended, is what enduring institutions are made of. I was encouraged to hear the principle clearly expressed regarding the role of an ethical communicator. It is not their job to ask, “How do you want us to smooth this over?” Rather, it is to encourage behavior and authentic communication that give people compelling reasons to remain committed to the cause.

This insight is more important than ever, as generative AI systems are making it easier and easier to create communications that seem authentic but which are not. Using generative AI tools transparently within the organization and in broader communications is critical for students and institutional leaders in higher education. Why? Because communications aren’t just about generating media that yield narrow effects. They are about building enduring communities and institutions by building warranted trust.

4. Face to Face Interactions are Increasingly Vital

With the arrival of powerful video and audio generation technologies, it will become increasingly difficult to trust the authenticity of anything we only experience through a screen. In terms of instruction, this means that there is likely to be more of a premium on in-person oral examinations and interactions. In terms of student life, cultivating environments where students with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences can personally thrive are likely more important than ever, both for their own thriving and for institutional survival.

Epilogue

Our approach to enhance communication between stakeholders aligns greatly with our belief in the power of AI to augment human understanding. In higher education, our recent work with The University of Michigan’s Division of Student Life underlines the importance of trust. U of M faced the challenge of modernizing a vast digital footprint, and TUG emphasized the need to align the diverse needs of various stakeholders. The project was a strategic endeavor to help U of M build warranted trust by better understanding the creative tensions they were wrestling with. Just as we sought to bring clarity and strategic alignment to the university’s digital communications, we see the potential of AI enhancing human communication and agency in higher education.

What do you think?

Will AI enhance human communication in the coming future or will it deter it? We’d love to hear from you.

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About the Author

Dan Heck is TUG’s Chief AI Ethicist. Dan’s passion is for clarifying complex issues to foster collective ethical decision-making. Drawing from 20 years in nonprofit leadership, his work integrates diverse perspectives for ethical, effective strategies, driven by the belief that ethical groups must prevail in competitive realms. Off-duty, he explores AI’s boundaries, indulges in AI-assisted art, and delves into imaginative storytelling with his daughter. Learn more about Dan and his work at TUG here.

Want to hear more from the TUG team related to Ethics and AI? Check these out.

- Ethical AI: Beyond Application to Integration
- Remember the Meta-Project
- Setting Artificial Intelligence Projects Up For Success