For my final project, I want to explore the intersection of anti-intellectualism and the disruption AI brings to our education system, and through that, examine the political consequences/implications that intersection brings. This would be presented as a multimedia essay that combines the use of text, images and videos. My reason for wanting to include pictures and videos is to demonstrate the chokehold these mediums of presenting information have on our attention span as the audience, which I think relates to the topic of anti-intellectualism. My goals for the project are to articulate the concerns raised by the rise of these two issues and their effect on our current political climate, and to potentially discover some ideas of what we can do to steer ourselves in a better direction.
To do this, I would start by defining and explaining anti-intellectualism and then giving some context to the rise of AI in our education system. From there, I would formulate some questions to ask AI, questions asking for information on current events and questions on what AI can do for the education system. I would take those responses into consideration while I further examine how all these topics interact. I hope that by better understanding the details of these concerns, I can start to think of and maybe even suggest ways in which we can address these concerns. I imagine the research for this is going to be tough. AI is still considerably new and so finding sources that talk about the way in which it affects our world are mostly going to be predictions/speculations. But considering how vast the internet is, I think I’ll be able to find enough sources for this. I’ll be looking for studies on attention spans, news covering current events that may contain mention of anti-intellectual rhetoric, and probably some other articles for this.
I’m currently debating whether or not to do a couple interviews of faculty and students. I think it would be interesting to include their perspectives on these topics and it would also be a cool form of media to include in the project. Should I?