MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — The July episode of Middle Tennessee State University’s “Out of the Blue” television magazine show looks at how the College of Media and Entertainment is teaching artificial intelligence and its impact on the creative industries.

Associate professor and coordinator for the Interactive Media program in the Department of Media Arts, Todd O’Neill stopped by the “Out of the Blue” set to discuss why teaching AI to students now will help them in the future when they’re embarking on their careers.

Watch the full segment below with host Andrew Oppmann, vice president for marketing and communications:

“I often tell people that whatever happens today, we’re teaching tomorrow. Sometimes, whatever happens this morning, we’re teaching it that afternoon because things are happening so quickly,” O’Neill said. “Our students need to be able to keep up and understand how to keep up once they get out in the world.”

While AI seems like new technology, O’Neill said people have used it for decades.

“If you’ve ever made an airplane reservation, that’s AI,” he said. “The big difference right now is that we have an interface that we can just put words in, and something happens; that’s the big thing that happened… Technology is super awesome, but we need to look at these products that are out there now and ask, ‘How can we use them and use them ethically and use them effectively?'”

O’Neill said he has integrated AI into his classroom and requires students to use it in their projects.

“This genie is absolutely out of the bottle, and it’s never going back. In my class, in many other classes, I have integrated AI assignments into project assignments. Rather than avoiding it, saying, ‘I don’t want my students near that because I’m concerned about plagiarism or it’s not their work,’ they have to use at least one AI element on their projects.

“They have to tell me what it is, what tool they used to create it, give me the list of prompts, and explain why they used it… It gets them using that critical thinking we’re trying to get them to use and then reflect on ‘what did they do? How do they feel about it? How did it work?’ and hopefully walk away from it with a better perspective on the tool and how it’s being used,” O’Neill explained.

“Out of the Blue” is available anytime on the university’s YouTube channel, the True Blue TV channel, Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. It also airs on Murfreesboro cable Channel 9 daily at 6 a.m., 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.; NewsChannel5+ at 3:30 p.m. Sundays; and streamed on the MTSU Jazz Network through WMOT.org at 7 a.m. on the first Sunday of each month; and on other cable outlets in Middle Tennessee, so check local listings. 

It is also available as a podcast on iTunes and Google Play and as individual interview segments on Spotify at https://spoti.fi/453hxg3. 

Watch previous episodes of “Out of the Blue” at https://mtsunews.com/out-of-the-blue. 

— DeAnn Hays (deann.hays@mtsu.edu)