You can't spell liberal arts without A and I.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

The explosion of artificial intelligence tools like chatbots has rocked the education world in the last couple years.

It spurred efforts to prohibit, detect, or otherwise build guardrails around these powerful new tools.

Some educators, though, are embracing them, and Colby College is doing it on an institutional level.

Four years ago, before most of the public had ever heard about large language models,

this private liberal arts college in Maine established a cross-disciplinary institute for AI to help educators and students

integrate the technology into their curricula in an ethical way. We had the college president on

back then to discuss, and today we want to check back in, this time with Michael Donahue,

interim director of the Davis Institute for AI at Colby College.

As a liberal arts institution, these cross-disciplinary conversations are a natural part of what we do.

And AI just provided an opportunity to think more deeply about conversations around ethics and moral uses of this particular technology.

I think what made it different, though, for us was that instead of being driven by the discipline,

these are being driven by our students. They're all using AI. And so figuring out how to align

that with what we're trying to do in the classroom, I think, presented

the biggest challenge for faculty here. Right. There's been a lot of angst, I think, in the

context of higher education about students using these. How has Colby kind of turned things on its

head? So we've done that in a couple different ways. These generative AI applications, they only work if you provide a really good prompt.

And there's a whole field now, a prompt engineer.

But teaching students to ask good questions is something we've done, and we do it really well.

And then the results you get from a generative AI application requires you to sort of deconstruct the response

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