LSU will incorporate artificial intelligence into the curriculum of more than 40 classes in the spring semester, according to LSU Executive Vice President and Provost Roy Haggerty.
Haggerty is leading the initiative to integrate AI into projects, operations, research and now coursework at LSU. This fall he helped create and teach a course, HNRS 3035, on the ethics, real-world applications and development of AI in large language models, similar to ChatGPT.
But HNRS 3035 was only the beginning.
Now the university is rallying faculty, staff and external stakeholders to explore the expansive terrain of AI applications.
“It’s like any other intellectual revolution in human history, the people in the lead get the most benefit,” Haggerty said. “I want LSU to be in the lead in the area of artificial intelligence, machine learning and large language models, at least in terms of our institutionalization of these tools.”
A wide variety of LSU courses are incorporating AI into their curriculum, including biology, math, sociology, political science, philosophy, even Italian.
Haggerty hopes LSU will eventually have even more classes teaching the development of AI tools.
“You can put AI to work in virtually every human endeavor in one way or another, so it makes sense that you would bring machine learning and AI into different classes to make the class better,” Haggerty said.
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Henry Hays, CEO and cofounder of DisruptREADY, a strategic advisory firm, currently teaches HNRS 3035 with Haggerty and James Ghawaly, an AI senior research scientist.
“I want to tip my hat to Roy Haggerty because we met June 21, for him to reach out to me and get a class syllabus written and students enrolled in about six weeks’ time in academia today is almost unheard of,” Hays said. “To give these students, and frankly LSU, the exposure and the opportunity, we’re lucky to have him in that post because that is really unusual behavior.”
AI knows more than any individual human ever and can spit that information out in nanoseconds, Hays said: That’s the power of what this technology can do.
“The technology is rapidly changing and improving, so it’s early but it isn’t,” Hays said. “Those that are going to get hurt are those that wait to adopt.”
Netflix took nearly four years to reach a million subscribers, Chat GPT matched that number in five days, Hays said.
“This is a great time to be an undergrad college student, because we’ve never seen a technology emerge in local business and life this fast,” Hays said.
Haggerty plans to ensure the consideration of ethics as LSU begins to integrate AI, concerning topics like intellectual property and system bias.
This fall the Southeastern Conference offered an online course in teaching with AI. Currently, 30 LSU professors are enrolled to learn more about how to incorporate AI into their classes.
The SEC designed the course to cover academic integrity, course creation, ethics and legal issues, use of AI tools to enhance student learning and leading conversations in departments and academic programs.
“One of the rarest resources that we have at the university is faculty time,” Haggerty said. “Freeing faculty up from some of the more mundane tasks that take up their time but don’t result in better learning or better scholarly outcomes is something I’d like to see.”
Fortunately, task replacement is one of AI’s most common applications—and not just for professors.
“Your average salesperson will do a lot of research behind the scenes on their customers, when that time could be better served in front of people closing deals,” Hays said. “Artificial intelligence automation through machine learning will take all the research out of that equation and hand it to that salesperson.”
LSU is launching three working groups on AI. One of which is tasked not only with providing cutting-edge AI education but also with preparing students for the future workforce.
“The older veteran people who are running companies of all sizes, the ones that are asking me about the kids in my class, they want to hire these kids yesterday,” Hays said. “They don’t know enough about AI and they’re willing to resource younger people who do know.”
There are going to be job titles not heard of today that are going to be in the market by the time most current LSU students graduate, Hays said.
“If you’re young and you’re going into the job market and you don’t have a handle of this technology, I think you need to be prepared to be asked why,” Hays said. “As a young person with the ability to learn quicker than most older people, you have to have this. If you go deeper with it, you can write your own ticket.”
Hays and Haggerty both believe companies leading in AI are either coming for the customers or the profit margins of companies who aren’t.
“At the end of the day it’s about opportunity for students, how do we get them quickly educated and with job offers,” Hays said. “This is where the future is in every industry, I know that to be true.”
Hays calls it “the great disruptor of our time.”
