When AI meets Creative Thought Matters

Artificial intelligence stirs intense emotions and vigorous intellectual debate. It’s not uncommon to feel excited and energized by the possibilities of AI while simultaneously feeling deep concern about its potential consequences.

But most tend to agree on one thing: AI is present and rapidly evolving — in our day-to-day activities, our workplaces, our classrooms, and broadly in how we acquire, process, and distribute information.

At Skidmore, many faculty, staff, and students are staying on top of the conversation, acknowledging that AI in higher education is an unfolding matter that needs to be addressed.

“There’s a coordinated effort going on to make sure we unlock what AI can mean for the College,” says Matt Lucas, F. William Harder Chair of Business Administration. Lucas is co-chair of Skidmore’s AI Working Group, which reports to President Marc Conner. He also serves in the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum at Skidmore, alongside Beck Krefting, professor of American studies and director of the Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning; Lead Instructional Technologists Aaron Kendall and Ben Harwood; and Professor of Mathematics and Director of First-Year Experience Rachel Roe-Dale. “We have to figure out, how much do we want AI to be part of our pedagogy? How much do we want AI to be involved in our staff work? How do we think about it across all the disciplines, and what, quite frankly, is education with AI-infused technology? Those are things that we have to decide and work on in a unified way across the college, still respecting individual needs and uses.” 

Recent and ongoing initiatives include AI think tanks; sessions on AI ethics; learning clusters for faculty; a yearlong Skill2Build AI Institute for faculty and staff; an AI Academy for beginner, intermediate, and advanced users; and multiple panel discussions that have highlighted both faculty and student perceptions. It’s no simple task, but robust programming is keeping ideation and dialogue open and active at Skidmore. 

We’ve gathered a selection of perspectives from faculty and staff that illustrate some of the many considerations at the forefront of conversations around AI at Skidmore. 

Matt Lucas

F. William Harder Chair of Business Administration, co-chair of Skidmore’s Presidential AI Working Group

It’s critical that AI is infused into our curriculum because our students are graduating into a world where AI is part of the work environment in many industries, and those who have human skills and AI skills are the most prepared. We’re seeing that when students combine AI skills with a Skidmore liberal arts education guided by Creative Thought Matters, they are tremendously valuable to organizations. 

The No. 1 piece of advice I give is to become great at prompting, no matter the tool. It’s not difficult to learn, but it does take practice. You also want to be fully engaged with your own learning and knowledge while using a tool, because offloading the AI content means you could be replaced. If you’re engaged and in control, you bring value and perspective to your work. 

I’ve learned how to use AI in the classroom to create an interactive, personalized learning experience, which is interesting in itself. In the context of business classes, for example, we do a lot of work with case studies. With the assistance of AI, each student can choose their own favorite company to research and simulate a business scenario. When students are able to select their own interests in the classroom, they become more engaged and learn more deeply. 

Overall, we have to be very thoughtful about how AI works with the learning experience and within each discipline. It’s a complex topic and it requires educators to be at the forefront of understanding those complexities and reflecting that in their curriculum.

Erica Wojcik

Associate professor of psychology

My focus right now as an educator is getting my students to stop and slow down and think carefully, which is very hard to do in today’s world. So much of user-friendly design is about making things faster and easier and cutting out the points of friction where we have to make a decision or sit with something hard. I find that a lot of activities around AI are intended to get rid of that friction and get an entry point into something without having to struggle. 

There are real uses in certain fields for the power of AI. But as educators, our goal is to cultivate the human mind. We need to ensure that society continues to value the thing that makes us human — our ability to be creative. We can’t just focus on creating the product; we need to focus on the process of creation and what we can discover from that process. The only way to get practice doing critical thinking is to do a ton of it. So, if you project into a world where we’re just getting rid of friction, we are going to lose the thread very quickly, and those thinking muscles are going to atrophy. 

There are really important conversations that need to be had about environmental and privacy concerns, but my major concern as an educator is the cost of using cognitive prosthetics and what that does to us as individual humans and as a community at large.

Emilio Vavarella

Assistant professor of media and film studies

What I do in my work is to think about our relationship with technology from as many different angles as possible. We often use technologies to extend ourselves. Increasingly more often, we extend our cognitive processes through AI, as we let AI do some of the thinking that we would otherwise be doing ourselves. This has profound consequences for teaching, learning, and the societies we are building. 

Learning how to use these tools and understanding that they have a huge power in framing our perspective is very important. For me, what’s interesting is to not simply do work with AI, but it’s to create work about AI. It’s to not use it simply as a tool, but to use it as an object that needs to be investigated and understood. 

I don’t think AI poses a direct and immediate threat to creativity, but I do think that we really need to do work that reflects and comments on AI from a human perspective. That’s fundamental, and the fields of art and media studies, in the broadest sense, are the best spaces to ask these questions. The problem that I see is when one becomes infatuated, in a superficial way, with whatever AI is doing. For example, the AI software Midjourney can make really beautiful images and is impressive, but what’s important is not how good the resolution of an image is, but what are you trying to represent and why? What is the meaning behind what you’re doing? I tell my students that I care about seeing how their minds work.

Erika Schielke

Senior teaching professor of biology

I think students who go on to do research in biology are going to encounter AI, and I think there are some really fascinating applications of generative AI in disease detection and in biological research. I don’t think we can avoid it. As an educator, one of my big takeaways is that I feel like I am trying to keep up. The tools are changing so rapidly that with any exercise, it’s a different output from semester to semester.

I’m finding that students’ comfort and familiarity with AI is hugely variable. Every semester, I have students who don’t want to use it because they don’t want to risk integrity violations. They don’t know where the boundaries are, so they’re afraid of it. There are also students who have ethical concerns, in particular around environmental impacts and labor exploitations, and I frankly share those concerns with students. 

As a way to think critically and creatively about AI in one of my classes, I have my students co-create a syllabus policy for how we use it. We don’t have a consensus in academia, and there’s no consensus in the scientific community or in the writing community, so — for now — we as a class come up with what we think is an appropriate policy. There are some cases in which we agree that AI is inappropriate, and it’s worthwhile to explore that. Students also find that prompt engineering practice — the process of revising their prompt to get a useful output — is among the most helpful exercises we engage in.

Catie Hamilton ’25

American studies major, business and Periclean Honors Forum minors

We should all be talking about AI because the reality is that it is here to stay. It’s something we all need to adapt to, and we need to address the fact that we’re going to be living with it. If you don’t stay on top of AI, other people will keep moving and you’ll fall behind, so it’s really important to know how you can use it to your advantage. There is a lot of talk about how it is going to affect the workforce, and I want to be able to get a job and still have a job in five or 10 years.

Particularly in humanities classes, though, I don’t necessarily know what the right way to go about handling AI is. I’m definitely very cognizant and kind of worried about leaning on it too much, and I don’t want it to impact my ability to think and express my ideas independently and to write well. 

An example of an assignment I worked on this year for which I adamantly felt “I am not using AI on this” was my senior thesis in American studies. It’s a 40-page research paper that we write over the course of one semester, and I cared so much about my topic and so much about what I was doing with that paper — and I was so proud of it as a culmination of everything I’ve worked toward in my educational career — that I wanted to write it for myself. 

Whether I’m writing, reading a novel for fun, or going to an art museum, I’m doing that to see what humans can produce. I don’t want it to be created by a machine, because that feels like it defeats the whole purpose.

Derrell Downey Jr. ’25

Computer science major 

At least in the tech world, AI is a complete game changer. 

Last summer I interned at a consulting firm, and AI literacy factored heavily into my internship. The company had its own ChatGPT model that was trained on the company’s data, and every employee was able to use it for pretty much any task. 

I was blown away by how it was able to save me time. I was given a task by a co-worker to deduplicate something like six million records, and doing it by hand would have taken weeks. The next step was to write a Python script, which probably would have taken all day, maybe two days. I knew how to do it, but it takes a while. The tool generated a script in less than a minute. I obviously had to make sure it worked and that everything was right, but having that tool saved me days. That being said, AI literacy is hugely important because you can’t create an effective prompt for things like this if you’re not AI literate. 

I think my biggest concern is the environment. I know that every prompt uses a lot of energy. Also, regarding bias, an AI model is also only as good as the data it’s trained on, and if the data itself is biased, then the translation will be too.