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Race, Migration, & Indigeneity

The inter- and multidisciplinary field of Race, Migration, & Indigeneity considers the ways in which race interweaves with historical and contemporary formations of identity

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to a set of technologies which enable computers to perform advanced functions that are typically thought to require human intelligence. These functions might include recognizing faces, analyzing data, driving cars, creating art, interpreting and generating written and spoken language, and more. AI systems are trained on vast amounts of data, allowing them to identify patterns and relationships which humans may not be able to see. The AI learning process often involves algorithms, which are sets of rules or instructions that guide an AI's analysis and decision-making. Through continuous learning and adaptation, AI systems have become increasingly adept at performing tasks, from recognizing images to translating languages and beyond.

This guide contains a selection of resources that can help teachers and students learn about AI, literacy, and ways to navigate AI in classroom settings, giving us all a strong foundation to ethically and responsibly use AI technologies.

Suggested introductory articles:


Sources: AI Literacy: A Framework to Understand, Evaluate, and Use Emerging Technology (Keun-woo Lee, Kelly Mills, Pati Ruiz, Merijke Coenraad, Judi Fusco, Jeremy Roschelle and Josh Weisgrau; Digital Promise, June 18, 2024); What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? (Google Cloud); What is AI? Everyone thinks they know but no one can agree. And that’s a problem (Will Douglas Heaven; MIT Technology Review, July 10, 2024)

You've probably been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence (AI)—but what is it exactly? As stated in the previous tab, artificial intelligence is a term that refers to technologies that are thought to require human intelligence. Though it might feel like AI had only recently been brought into our lives, it has actually been around since the 1950s. The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (known as the Dartmouth Workshop) was a 1956 summer workshop widely considered to be the founding event of artificial intelligence as a field.

Participants at the Dartmouth Workshop, 1956.

Image: Participants at the Dartmouth Workshop. The Minsky Family (1956).

In the 1980s, "expert systems" (programs that answer questions or solve problems about a specific domain of knowledge) became widely used by corporations around the world to streamline processes like ordering computer systems and identifying compounds in spectrometer readings. In the 2000s, AI were trained on big data, leading to new systems that could perform tasks such as facial recognition, natural language processing, answer trivia questions (remember IBM's Waston?), and more.

IBM's Watson competing on Jeopdary in 2011

Image: IBM's Watson competing on Jeopardy in 2011.

Since 2020, we have been in an "AI Boom" era, following the release of large language models exhibiting human-like traits of knowledge, attention and creativity such as ChatGPT. For more on the current state of AI, check out the following video:

Video: How will AI change the world? Ted-ED (2022). Stuart Russell discusses the current limitations of artificial intelligence and the possibility of creating human-compatible technology.


Articles

There is a long history of depicting artificial beings in literature. Even in antiquity, thinkers and alchemists were imagining artificial beings endowed with intelligence or consciousness by master craftsmen. The books listed below are in chronological order beginning in the 1800s and highlight some pivotal moments of AI in fiction.

For more films, see Wikipedia's list of artificial intelligence films or this list on Letterboxd.

AI Software

A generative AI system creates new text, images, or other media in response to prompts. As a student, it is important to take caution when utilizing AI software, especially for coursework or when importing data. To help you ethically and responsibly engage with these tools (especially generative ones), see the AI literacy box below and read through the acceptable uses of generative AI services at IU prepared by University Information Technology Services (UITS). Always ask your professor or TA if you are using AI for a class assignment.

The remainder of this box contains a collection of software (all with free trial or free tier options). We have focused on AI that can assist with productivity, task management, studying, and organizing your work and personal life, rather than generative AI.

AI Software at IU

  • Microsoft Copilot Available for use by faculty, staff, and students aged 18 and older, and is the recommended way to use generative AI within the IU environment. Copilot is approved to interact with University-Internal data. You must be logged in with your IU email to ensure you're using Microsoft 365 at IU rather than the consumer-based Copilot service. To date, no other generative AI tools have been approved for data beyond Public classification. Copilot is built on the same AI models and data as ChatGPT-4, so you can use it to write and summarize content, create code, and answer complex questions. Copilot also has access to current internet data, enabling it to provide real-time responses to current events (a feature not available in ChatGPT, which is based on data up to 2021).
  • AIU Toolkit The AIU Toolkit allows developers to directly use Azure services like Azure OpenAI to quickly develop generative AI experiences with a diverse set of prebuilt and curated models from OpenAI Meta and beyond.
  • Adobe Firefly As part of IU's software license with Adobe, you have access to the Firefly web app and generative AI features inside apps like Photoshop and Illustrator as well as Adobe Stock.

More Software

Productivity

  • BeeDone Turns boring tasks into little games, offering rewards whenever you move forward. It keeps track of your habits, offers an AI assistant to guide you, and you can spin the Task Roulette if you feel like tackling a random one from your list. Free option available.
  • goblin.tools A collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult. Free for everyone.
  • Any.do An easy-to-manage to-do list that can help you organize personal tasks, family projects, and teams all in one place. Free tier available.
  • Todoist A task manager that allows you to capture and organize tasks instantly, simplify your planning, and manage personal or team projects. Free tier available.

Calendar Management

  • Reclaim AI calendar for work and life. Optimizes schedules for better productivity, collaboration, and work-life balance. Free "Lite" tier option.
  • Clockwise Works across entire teams and companies to craft schedules based on preferences. Free tier available.
  • Motion Automatically plan your day based on your tasks and priorities, focusing on project management. Free trial with tiered plans after trial ends.

See more scheduling assistants and comparison charts here.


Sources: The best AI productivity tools in 2024 Miguel Rebelo, Zapier Blog

Meetings

  • Firefly Helps your team transcribe, summarize, search, and analyze voice conversations. Can transcribe meetings, tracking the conversation topics along the way. It has a bot called Fred that can handle summarize the meeting's contents, generating text, and searching through your history to meet your query. Free tier available.
  • Krisp Maximizes the productivity of online meetings with its AI-powered Noise Cancellation, Transcriptions, Meeting Notes and Recording. Free tier available.
  • Otter.ai Never take meeting notes again. Get transcripts, automated summaries, action items, and chat with Otter to get answers from your meetings. You can try Otter.ai for free, but paid versions allow for more minutes of recorded chats over a month.

Presentations & Websites

  • Gamma Create unlimited presentations, websites, and more without coding. Free tier available.
  • Slidesgo Generate presentations in minutes. Make changes to the presentation as needed. Free tier.
  • Wix Website builder that allows you to design with a full suite of intuitive tools and powerful AI, manage your business, streamline your day-to-day with built-in business solutions, and expand your reach and monetize your website with integrated tools built for your success. Free with Wix branding and domain; from $17/month for the Light plan, including a custom domain for one year.

Email and Inbox Management

  • SaneBox Uses A.I. to manage your email inbox, so you can focus on your most important work and get more done. Works with most inboxes. Free trial with tiered plans after trial ends.
  • Mailbutler Email extension that adds useful features to your Apple Mail, Gmail, or Outlook inbox. Free trial with tiered plans after trial ends.

Learning & Note-Taking

  • Socratic With help from teachers, Socratic brings you visual explanations of important concepts in a variety of subjects. Free.
  • Notion An all-in-one workspace that allows students to organize and manage their tasks, notes, and projects. It combines the features of note-taking, task management, and project planning into a single platform. Free tier available.
  • Evernote Use Evernote for note taking, project planning, and to find what you need, when you need it. Free tier available.
  • Mem AI notes app that helps you locate, organize, and curate notes. Mem uses AI to tag and connect the notes you take, so you don't have to spend time organizing them.

Studying

  • Anki An intelligent flashcard app that uses spaced repetition algorithms to help with memorization. Open source and free.
  • ExamCram Convert notes to AI-Generated quizzes in minutes. Transform lecture slides, notes, and more into engaging quizzes for faster learning and better retention. Free to use.

Research

Note: Though this can help you summarize research more quickly, it is important to be cautious and read papers yourself if you plant to cite them or include them in your research

  • Elicit Analyze research papers at superhuman speed. Automate time-consuming research tasks like summarizing papers, extracting data, and synthesizing your findings. . Free basic plan available.
  • Scite Has a suite of products that help researchers develop their topics, find papers, and search citations in context (describing whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence). Free 7 day trial.
  • Consensus Uses AI to help researchers find and synthesize answers to research questions, focusing on the scholarly authors' findings and claims in each paper. Free (20 searches/month); Paid version allows unlimited searching.
  • Semantic Scholar Provides brief summaries ('TLDR's) of the main objectives and results of papers. Free.

See a comparison chart of AI tools for research here.

Citation Management

Note: Always double-check generated citations.

  • Zotero Open-source citation management software that collects, manages, and cites research sources. Browser extension allows users to save citations with a single click. Free for IU students.
  • Mendeley Citation management software with a focus on an online software with a matching desktop version, called Mendeley Reference Manager.
  • Paperpile Manage your research library right in your browser, save time with a smart, intuitive interface, access your PDFs from anywhere, add citations and bibliographies to Google Docs. Free 30-day trial.
  • ResearchRabbit A citation-based mapping tool that focuses on the relationships between research works. It uses visualizations to help researchers find similar papers and other researchers in their field.

Language Learning

  • GPTionary "A next-generation thesaurus that empowers underprivileged communities, particularly non-native English speakers, to enhance their language abilities and open up doors to better education and job prospects." Search for words or phrases by describing them.
  • Langotalk Get 24/7 language immersion with personalized AI chat-based tools. 7-day free trial.
  • LanguaTalk Speak with human-like AI that’s available 24/7. Practice without pressure - you can make mistakes freely and get instant feedback. Free tier.

Chatbots have the potential to revolutionize our lives, make work more efficient, and free up time so that people can focus on other tasks. However, it is important to be very cautious when using chatbots. Not only are they newly-developed and continually evolving, but we have already seen bias in many other AI systems (see the "Centering Justice" tab for more. Before using an AI chatbot, make sure you understand the risk and be sure to use the AI Literacy Framework above to evaluate outputs. See below for articles on the risks of chatbots:


Chatbots

Claude Built for work and trained to be safe, accurate, and secure. Claude can answer nuanced questions and create a variety of content. Trained by Anthropic using Constitutional AI. While Claude is fast and well-organized, it is not connected to the internet and does not automatically provide sources. Free tier available.

Perplexity A research chatbot that is good at providing sources (which it lists in an easily-accessible sidebar). Though Perplexity gives nuanced answers in an easy-to-follow list, it does tend to rely on Reddit posts as sources, which most people cannot cite for their projects. Free tier available.

ChatGPT Offers meaningful answers with a good amount of context on a variety of topics. While ChatGPT is good at most tasks like research and writing emails, it can be slow at times and it can be tedious to get ChatGPT to cite its sources. Developed by OpenAI and free to use.

InterviewBy.ai Practice job interview questions tailored to your job description. Get instant AI feedback and suggestions to improve your answers. Free plan includes 3 questions/month

Transcription

  • Otter.ai Get transcripts, automated summaries, action items, and chat with Otter to get answers from your meetings, lectures, or other recorded materials. You can try Otter.ai for free, but paid versions allow for more minutes of recorded chats over a month.

Visuals and Photography

  • Photoshop With generative AI in Photoshop you can create just about anything you can imagine using simple text prompts. Zip through dozens of ideas and generate new assets with Text to Image. Photoshop is free for IU community members.
  • remove.bg Remove image background and replace it with a transparent background (PNG), white background, or get the cutout of a photo.
  • Clipdrop by Jasper Remove backgrounds, people, or text from images. Free tier available.

AI Detectors

  • Originality.ai AI Checker, plagiarism checker, and fact checker. You can get 50 credits by installing the free AI detection Chrome Extension to test Originality.ai’s detection capabilities. 1 credit can scan 100 words.
  • Brandwell The AI Detector identifies ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and various other AI models. Tells you if something sounds like it is written by a human or if it sounds robotic. 7-day free trial.

AI Literacy

Though many people have grown up surrounded by AI technologies that have affected everything from traffic patterns to the products available at grocery stores, the recent release of ChatGPT brought AI to the forefront of our lives. The increased accessibility of AI bring with it a need for AI literacy. In this context, literacy does not simply refer to the ability to use AI technologies but to the combination of knowledge and skills that allow users to critically understand and evaluate AI tools in an increasingly digital world. In our daily lives, we implement information, media, financial, and health literacy when performing all kinds of tasks. When practicing AI literacy, one might ask questions like: How does this technology work? What kind of data was this system trained on? What biases are present in this technology? How does this impact my world and the world around me?


Source: AI Literacy, Explained (Alyson Klein; EducationWeek, May 10, 2023)

Everyday, we utilize different literacies. For example, when we read the news, we might use an information literacy framework to determine whether or not we can trust the media which we encounter. We can ask questions about who created or funded an article, about why the message of the piece is being sent, and about what kind of research went into the piece. Similarly, we can utilize an AI Literacy Framework when utilizing AI-enable technologies or engaging with the outputs of such systems. The following practices, developed by consultants and research at Digital Promise, define how users can understand and evaluate AI-enabled tools and how educators can support AI literacy development.

AI Literacy Practice Description Student Looks For
Algorithmic Thinking, Abstraction & Decomposition Develop and/or use a computer’s ability to recognize data and create a prediction or perform an action based on both the situation and stored information without explicit human guidance.
  • Training and/or prompting AI tools and systems
  • Defining procedures as algorithms
  • Testing and debugging
  • Breaking down problems into smaller parts
Data Analysis & Inference Consider the context of datasets, data visualizations, and data collection with criticality. Assess quality of training data for AI tools and leverage AI models and methods to collect, analyze, and visualize data.
  • Determine quality (accuracy, completeness, validity, etc ) of dataset
  • Analyzing and organizing datasets
  • Describing patterns and relationships
  • Evaluating and deducing information
Data Privacy & Security Develop awareness of data privacy and security while fostering ownership and agency of how to protect data in AI-enabled systems. This includes the privacy and security of personal data collected by an AI system or tool and how that data is used.
  • Identifying how personal information is being collected, used, and shared
  • Preventing tools from collecting data and/or deleting data that was collected
  • Investigating AI models and methods that were used to develop a tool
  • Identifying datasets that were used to train an AI model
Digital Communication
& Expression
Understand how AI Systems create synthetic content, evaluate synthetic AI creations, and
consider ethical responsibilities when consuming, creating, and sharing AI-enabled products.
  • Understand norms and best practices of use, development, and application AI systems
  • Evaluate outputs of AI-enabled system for appropriate tone, audience, and content
  • Responsibly engage in the consumption, creation, or sharing of AI-enabled products, including ethical sourcing and citation
Ethics & Impact Examine the outputs of algorithms and question the biases inherent in the AI systems
and tools being used. Consider the benefits and harms of AI tools to the environment, people, or society Importantly, it includes
considering how datasets, including their accessibility and representation, reproduce bias in our society.
  • Understand how values, beliefs, and points of view are applied through AI-enabled systems and outputs
  • Determine if and how an AI algorithm is the right tool for the job
  • Consider the benefits and/or costs of AI to individuals, society, and the environment
  • Understand if AI is perpetuating issues of access and equity
Information &
Mis/Disinformation
Determine credibility of AI system outputs in digital landscapes. This includes evaluating datasets and AI products/outputs for false, inaccurate or misleading information.
  • Analyze and synthesize multiple perspectives to support lateral reading
  • Cite valid, reliable data and evidence that apply in a variety of situations across contexts
  • Evaluate the credibility or accuracy of an output or prediction
  • Identify how bias in data collection informs reporting

Source: AI Literacy: A Framework to Understand, Evaluate, and Use Emerging Technology (Kelly Mills, Pati Ruiz, Keun-woo Lee, Merijke Coenraad, Judi Fusco, Jeremy Roschelle, & Josh Weisgrau; Digital Promise, June 2024)

The ROBOT Test

Similar to an AI Literacy framework, the ROBOT test, developed by librarians at McGill University (Amanda Wheatley and Sandy Hervieux) offers a helpful mnemonic for evaluating AI systems and outputs. "Being AI Literate does not mean you need to understand the advanced mechanics of AI. It means that you are actively learning about the technologies involved and that you critically approach any texts you read that concern AI, especially news articles."

Reliability Objective Bias Ownership Type

Reliability
  • How reliable is the information available about the AI technology?
  • If it’s not produced by the party responsible for the AI, what are the author’s credentials? Bias?
  • If it is produced by the party responsible for the AI, how much information are they making available? 
    • Is information only partially available due to trade secrets?
    • How biased is they information that they produce?
Objective
  • What is the goal or objective of the use of AI?
    • Is this AI open access or does it require payment? Is it a for-profit system?
  • What is the goal of sharing information about it?
    • To inform?
    • To convince?
    • To find financial support?
Bias
  • What could create bias in the AI technology?
  • Are there ethical issues associated with this?
  • Are bias or ethical issues acknowledged?
    • By the source of information?
    • By the party responsible for the AI?
    • By its users?
  • What kind of data sets is this AI trained on?
Owner
  • Who is the owner or developer of the AI technology?
  • Who is responsible for it?
    • Is it a private company?
    • The government?
    • A think tank or research group?
  • Who has access to it?
  • Who can use it?
Type
  • Which subtype of AI is it? It it generative? General AI or Narrow AI?
  • Is the technology theoretical or applied?
  • What kind of information system does it rely on?
  • Does it rely on human intervention?

Articles


Books

For more books, see the following subject headings in IUCAT:

AI and Education

AI has many applications at all levels of education. Though we may know AI best for the way it has reshaped student learning (through the proliferation of generative AI technologies that can create text, code, and other types of content), AI is also utilized by teachers and administrators. Predictive AI tools can analyze patterns in student data to forecast outcomes such as graduation rates and student learning milestones. These insights allow educators to intervene proactively but require careful evaluation for potential bias. See some more uses of AI in education below:

Chart of AI Applications in education

Chart: Examples of AI Applications in Education (Digital Promise).

AI also has many potential benefits when implemented in an educational setting. Of course, there are many risks as well:

Graphic: Potential risks and benefits of AI in education (TeachAI).

In this box, we have selected frameworks, toolkits, books, and articles that will help teachers and students implement and utilize AI in their classrooms.

Teaching and Working with AI

Centering Justice

Much research has been done on bias in AI. As AI becomes more ubiquitous, it is important to understand that our own unconscious, implicitly biased associations can affect AI models, resulting in biased outputs. Though we might think of technology as neutral, AI has a long history of perpetuating biases present in our society such as racism, ableism, ageism, sexism, homophobia, and more. We should also think about the climate impact of AI when discussing its ethics. This box contains articles, books, and reports to help you learn more.

Video: Artificial Intelligence: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. (2023, HBO)

Articles

Additional Resources