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.\u00a0Faculty and scholars I spoke to whose lectures are included in Atomic are disturbed by their lectures being used in this way\u2014as out-of-context, extremely short clips some cases\u2014and several said they felt blindsided or angered by the launch. Most say they weren\u2019t 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.\u00a0\ud83d\udca1Do you know anything else about ASU Atomic specifically, or how AI is being implemented at your own school? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.AI in schools has been highly controversial, with experiments like the \u201cAI-powered private school\u201d Alpha School and AI agents that offer to live the life of a student for them, no learning required. In this case, the AI tool in question is created directly by a university, using the labor of its faculty\u2014but without consulting that faculty.\u00a0\u201cWe are testing an early version of ASU Atomic to learn what works, and what doesn’t, to further improve the learner experience before a full release,\u201d the Atomic FAQ page says. \u201cOnce you start your subscription, you may generate unlimited, custom built learning modules tailored specifically to your learning goals and schedule.\u201dThe FAQ notes that ASU alumni and those who \u201cpreviously expressed interest in ASU’s learning initiatives or participated in research that helped shape ASU Atomic\u201d were invited to test the beta. But on Monday morning, I signed up for a free 12 day trial of the Atomic platform with my personal email address \u2014 no ASU affiliation required. I first learned about the platform after seeing ASU Professor of US Literature Chris Hanlon post about it on Bluesky.\u00a0\u201cWhen I looked at it, I was really surprised to see my own face, and the faces of people I know, and others that I don’t know\u201d in module materials generated by Atomic, Hanlon said. It had clipped a one-minute snippet from a 12 minute video he\u2019d done as part of a lecture mentioning the literary critic Cleanth Brooks, which the AI transcribed as \u201cClient\u201d Brooks. \u201cWhat was in that video did not strike me as something anyone would understand without a lot more context,\u201d Hanlon said. When he contacted his colleagues whose lecture videos were also in that module, they were all just as shocked and alarmed, he said. \u201cI mean, it happens to all of us in certain ways all the time, but have your institution do it\u2014to have the university you work for use your image and your lectures and your materials without your permission, to chop them up in a way that might not reflect the kind of teacher you really are… Let alone serve that to an actual student in the real world.\u201d The videos appear to be scraped from Canvas, ASU\u2019s learning management system where lecture materials and class discussions are made available to students. Canvas is owned by Instructure, and is one of the most popular learning management systems in the country, used by many universities. \u201cASU Atomic currently draws from ASU Online’s full library of course content across subjects including business, finance, technology, leadership, history, and more. If ASU teaches it, Atom\u2014your AI learning partner\u2014can build a hyper-personalized learning module around it,\u201d the Atomic FAQ page says.As of Monday afternoon, after I reached out at the ASU Atomic email address for comment, signups on Atomic were closed. I could still make new modules using my existing login, however.In my own test, I went through a series of prompts with a chatbot that determined what I wanted my custom module to be. I told it I was interested in learning about ethics in artificial intelligence at a moderate-beginner level, with a goal of learning as fast as possible.\u00a0AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge\u201cFascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another.\u201d404 MediaJason KoeblerAtomic generated a seven-section learning module, with sections that repeated titles (\u201cEthics and Responsibility in AI\u201d and \u201cAI Ethics: From Theory to Practice\u201d). The first clip in the first section is a two-minute video taken from a lecture by Euvin Naidoo, Thunderbird School of Management’s Distinguished Professor of Practice for Accounting, Risk and Agility. In it, Naidoo talks about \u201cx-riskers,\u201d who he defines as \u201ca community that believes that the progress and movement and acceleration in AI is something we should be cautious about.\u201d Atomic\u2019s AI transcribes this as \u201cX-Riscus,\u201d and transfers that error throughout the module, referring to \u201cX-Riscus\u201d over and over in the section and the quiz at the end.\u00a0The next section jumps directly into the middle of a lecture where a professor is talking about a study about AI in healthcare, with no context about why it\u2019s showing this:\u00a0In a later section, film studies professor and Associate Director of ASU\u2019s Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, Sarah Florini, appears in a minute-long clip from a completely unrelated lecture where she briefly defines artificial intelligence and machine learning. But the content of what she\u2019s saying is irrelevant to the module because it came from a completely unrelated class and is taken out of context.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cIt makes me feel like somebody that’s less knowledgeable about me, they’re going to be naive about these positions, and they’re going to think either that an \u2018expert\u2019 said it so therefore it must be true”\u201cThis was a video from one of the courses in our online Film and Media Studies Masters of Advanced Study. The class is FMS 598 Digital Media Studies. It is not a course about AI at all,\u201d Florini told me. \u201cIt is an introduction to key concepts used to study digital media in the field of media studies.\u201d She recorded it in 2020, before generative AI was widely used. \u201cThat slide and those remarks were just in there to get students to think of AI as a sub-category of machine learning before I talked about machine learning in depth. That is not at all how I would talk about AI today or in a class that focused more on machine learning and AI tech technologies,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s really a great example of how problematic it is to take snippets of people teaching and decontextualize them in this way.\u201d\u00a0Florini told me she wasn\u2019t aware of the existence of the Atomic platform until Friday. \u201cI was not notified in any way. To the best of my knowledge no faculty were notified. And there was no option to opt in or out of this project,\u201d she said.Another ASU scholar I contacted whose lecture was included in the module Atomic generated for me (and who requested anonymity to speak about this topic) said they\u2019d only just learned about the existence of Atomic from my email. They searched their inbox for mentions of it from the administration or anyone else, in case they missed an announcement about it, but found nothing. Their lecture snippet presented by Atomic was extremely short and attempted to unpack a very complex topic.\u201cI don’t love the idea of my lectures being taken out of the context of my overall course, and of the readings for that module, and then just presented as saying something,\u201d they told me. \u201cIt makes me feel like somebody that’s less knowledgeable about me, they’re going to be naive about these positions, and they’re going to think either that an \u2018expert\u2019 said it so therefore it must be true… Or they’re gonna think, that’s obviously fucking stupid, this \u2018expert\u2019 must be dumb. But I could have been presenting a foil!\u201d\u00a0The clips are so short, it’s impossible in some cases to discern context at all.That lecturer told me the idea of their work being chopped up and used in this way was less a matter of concern for their ownership of the material, and more distressing that someone might come away from these modules with half-baked or wrong conclusions about the topics at hand. \u201cAll of the complexity of the topic is being flattened, as though it’s really simple,\u201d they said of the snippet Atomic made of their lecture. When they assign this topic to students, it comes with dozens of pages of peer reviewed academic papers, they said. Atomic provides none of that. The module Atomic produced in my test provided zero source links, zero outside readings for further study, no specific citations for where it was getting this information whatsoever, and no mention of who was even in the videos it presented, unless a Zoom name or other name card was visible in the videos.\u00a0\u201cI would really like to know, how did this particular thing happen? How did this actually end up on the asu.edu website?\u201d Hanlon said. \u201cIt is such a clunky thing. It is so far removed from what I think the typical educational experience at ASU is. Who decided this would represent us?\u201d\u00a0ASU Atomic, the ASU president\u2019s office, and media relations did not immediately respond to my requests for comment, but I\u2019ll update if I hear back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"