Welcome to "How I AI"—where innovation meets education.
In this inaugural article of "How I AI," Vice Provost and Graduate Dean, Professor Hrant Hratchian, shares his insights into AI’s role in academia, bridging the theoretical and practical. From coding assistance to academic writing refinement, he discusses how AI can augment, but not replace, the creative and intellectual processes. His nuanced approach — acknowledging the challenges while championing thoughtful adoption — provides a blueprint for how institutions can navigate the evolving AI landscape.Photo: Hrant Hratchian at work, as visualized in ChatGPT 4.0
In his administrative capacity, Hrant Hratchian sees his primary responsibility as one to provide opportunity and oversight to the graduate education mission and postdoctoral training mission of the university, and to serve as an advocate and representative for the university in that capacity.
But he is also a faculty in the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, with a very active research group comprising six Ph.D. students. In that capacity he is well-placed to discuss not just the big picture, but the details of everyday use of AI tools in research and academic writing.
Coding with ChatGPT
When it comes to integrating AI, Hrant got in at the ground floor. He was introduced to ChatGPT at a meeting called by the Council of Graduate Schools in December 2022. He remains a big fan of ChatGPT, referring to it fondly as ‘Chat.’ Since 2022, Hrant has used ‘Chat’ in several areas, including debugging research code (he is a theoretical chemist) and even converting handwritten mathematical notes to LaTeX format.
Hrant does emphasize a nuanced view on the use of AI: “I still write my code from scratch more often than not. Occasionally I use Chat to help track down a tough bug or help me think through ways to further optimize code performance.”
In particular, he has found that AI is a very helpful tool when working with a new programming language — more of an interactive tutor than a solution-granter. “I have a code that simulates spectral data. It's written in Fortran and generates a gnuplot file. I decided a more interactive version might be helpful and Chat helped me build out a pilop Jupiter notebook. It's not that I couldn't figure it out on my own, but Chat saves me time — a valuable and limited resource — and facilitates the use of a language I don't use frequently or know natively.”
What else does ‘Chat’ help Hrant with?
One of our major topics of discussion, given that Hrant is going to be a key player in developing AI-usage related policy, was the role of AI in academic writing. While some scholars take an adamant stance against the involvement of AI in writing, he takes a much more layered approach, seeing AI as a powerful editing tool that can be useful in finding inconsistencies, suggesting improvements to structure, and even helping to reverse outline a document.
“I've used Chat to help edit emails, memos, letters ... generally all correspondence that I write,” he said. “I've told it not to change my sentence structures. I tell Chat it cannot delete any sentences, but rather I ask for suggested alternatives to paragraph order or if there seem to be holes in a narrative,” he clarified, highlighting that it is all about keeping one’s own voice and using AI as a means of enhancement. Which explains why Hrant’s emails sound like him, except better!
And what about teaching or advising usage of AI?
“So, the conversation around using AI in our lab is, I would say, evolving. It's come up in multiple contexts. I think we've talked about it in different ways,” he said, and elaborates a bit more about using AI in his graduate class this upcoming semester. “There are good ways to incorporate AI into a high-level graduate course. We do a lot of coding and a lot of math in the course. One thought I have is to develop coding and theory exercises specifically structured around AI incorporation. I'm aiming to provide an opportunity for students to explore AI's potential in supporting, enhancing, and advancing one's learning and knowledge discovery."
Take note, those taking this class!
Challenges and Future Implications
As our discussion turned to broader institutional challenges and opportunities, Hrant noted the inevitability of artificial intelligence: institutions of learning are faced with a choice only between immediate or delayed adoption. His clear sense is that adoption is inevitable. And while some University of California campuses have taken significant steps in integration of AI in some respects, much work needs to be done across the system given that there is a need for clear directives that explore opportunities to embrace the growing role of AI in scholars’ future careers.
“The academic community is, in general, slow to change and comfortable with what it knows. AI is a disruptive force. It’s only been two years since OpenAI went public, followed by a sort of second generation of learned generative AI tools about six or nine months after that, and then the sort of discussion around how to actually do prompt engineering took hold just a few months later. The pace of advancement and adoption of AI is staggering. A concern — and really the motivation behind the How I AI series of interviews — is that discussion among colleagues sharing experiences and contemplating ethics concerns, learning opportunities, and research potential hasn't been keeping up. I think the future of AI in research and learning will be quite exciting.”
What about using AI tools in everyday work, especially by students?
First up, Hrant clarifies “hard boundaries are not yet well defined.” He points out that this is a question of allowing students the use of AI tools while, at the same time, developing critical thinking skills, deep understanding, and their voice and individual writing style.
“I think that there has to at least be part of the conversation focused on acknowledging upfront that AI is a reality, and then encouraging everybody — students, staff, and faculty — who might participate in any kind of activity around AI to join in the conversation. We have an exciting opportunity to learn together.”
There we have it — a complex balancing act for educational institutions expecting to infuse artificial intelligence into their structures of pedagogy. But at least, UC Merced’s Graduate Dean is on board with AI — he uses ChatGPT for his own work, and thinks universities should embrace it smartly rather than fight it, while emphasizing the need for thoughtful policies that preserve core educational values for the students.
Interested in contributing? Email sghosh@ucmerced.edu
