Amanda Ashley

Associate Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry

Regular Faculty

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ashleyak@nmsu.edu

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I use AI widely in research and teaching. For research, I often use Google Gemini and ChatGTP to assure I am understanding subject matters correctly. While I realize there can be errors (which I will allude to later), I largely find AI tools to be largely accurate in my field, with few hallucinations. I use AI more extensively in my teaching in multiple ways. I upload PDFs of my course material into NotebookLM, from which I generate a study guide and a podcast for each set of lectures (a total of approximately 14 per semester). These resources are then uploaded onto canvas for my students, and I do this for all of my lecture-heavy courses, all of which are above a 300 level. In another class, I have a five part assignment that requires the students to use AI to investigate a toxin. They are given a series of prompts which can be used in either the paid versions of AI or the free versions (so as not to induce a financial burden on the students) and asked to provide what AI they used as well as the responses. The last two sections of the assignment include writing a research article that evaluates the accuracy and fullness of the responses generated by AI with the scientific literature, and, after receiving feedback from me, they give a presentation to the entire class. Because each student is doing the assignment on a unique chemical moiety, it is a very challenging and time consuming assignment to grade, but I have received ample positive feedback from my students, who say that they learn so much from this structure. Forcing them to use AI and showing them how they can use it to improve their own understanding (i.e., generating a quiz and trying to see how well they perform, etc.) also de-demonizes AI and removes the stigma that the only way to use it is cheating. I also have a section that I dedicate to discussing AI when I teach both Research Ethics as well as Professional Development. I firmly believe this generation is going to be required to know how to adeptly use these tools, and as educators, we should be empowering them to do so.