Oregon middle and high schoolers have a new tool to help them explore career pathways. Sassy, an artificial intelligence career coach, launched in September as part of the state’s Career Connected Learning initiative. The tool was developed by Ed Madison, an associate media professor at the University of Oregon and executive director of the nonprofit Journalistic Learning Initiative. Madison also developed the JLI’s extensive suite of AI coaches, which help students generate ideas and hone their skills in everything from sports writing to photography to solutions journalism.
Madison joins us to talk about the many ways artificial intelligence can be used to help students, as well as the challenges it presents.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon middle and high schoolers have a new tool to help them explore potential career pathways. It’s called Sassy, and it’s an AI career coach. The tool was developed by Ed Madison, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Oregon and the executive director of the nonprofit Journalistic Learning Initiative. Madison also developed the JLI’s extensive suite of AI coaches that can help students do things like generate story ideas or craft interview questions. Ed Madison joins us now. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.
Ed Madison: Great, thank you. Glad to be here.
Miller: As I mentioned, you developed a lot of these tools through something called the Journalistic Learning Initiative, or JLI. How does artificial intelligence fit into that nonprofit’s mission?
Madison: Well, specifically, our mission is about enhancing educational outcomes for students, mostly middle and high schoolers. So, to the degree that AI is now a part of the repertoire that educators are trying to make sense of, it’s very appropriate for us to be inserting ourselves into that spectrum.
Miller: The most general tool in this suite of tools for the journalism focused ones is called Murrow. They’re all named after various legendary or maybe lesser-known, but should be legendary, journalists. What does Murrow do?
Madison: I think the best way to think about it is that for students of journalism, often the most confronting thing is a blank screen, knowing where to start in terms of even finding a good story. What Murrow does is it helps students ideate. It helps them then think about how to approach an interview. It helps them construct questions. What it won’t do for them is actually write their story. None of the tools do that. We coined the term “ethical AI” because we think that AI has a lot of uses in journalism, but it shouldn’t be writing for students.
Miller: There are AI coaches for several different types of specific reporting or writing, from sports stories to features, to opinion or essay writing. How do you train these different algorithms on these respective specialties?
Madison: You know, it’s funny … if you’d asked me a year-and-a-half ago if I’d be developing AI tools, I would have looked at you sideways because I was clueless. I met a team of researchers that had been affiliated with MIT’s Media Lab, at a company called Play Lab on the East Coast. I met one of the founders at a conference and we started talking, and he told me that he was working with educators to train AI tools to help with five-paragraph essay writing. And I was like, “huh, what about journalism?” And he said, “yeah, you could do that.”
So, to answer your question, it’s drawing on my own expertise as an instructor in a lot of these areas over the last 12, 14 years. It’s giving it specific instructions as to how to engage with the user so that it promotes more critical thinking, deeper introspection, but yet doesn’t cross the line of actually doing the work for the user.
Miller: Well, let’s get to that part, because just playing around with the tool this morning, I wrote that I was going to interview someone who was homeless and I asked, “what questions should I ask them?” It said, first, that I should approach them – the interview subjects – with sensitivity and respect. And then it provided a bunch of questions. Let me read some of them right now: “Can you tell me a little about your background and how you came to be in the situation? What’s a typical day like for you? Have you been able to access any services or support? What do you wish people understood about homelessness? What changes do you think would make a positive difference for people experiencing homelessness?”
To be perfectly honest, I have asked versions of all of those questions multiple times. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a good tool, but it’s a tool that meshes with my own instincts, I guess. But still, I feel like something would be lost if I were a student or a professional and I use this computer to give me questions, as opposed to thinking about them for myself and coming up with my own questions, even if they’re the same questions. And maybe my ego is getting in the way here.
But, do you agree? Do you think that something is lost if you rely on a tool like this to generate something like the questions you’re gonna ask a fellow human being?
Madison: I do. I think that the tool is best used with instruction. It’s not really designed to teach someone journalism on their own. I think that it’s designed to enhance the educational experience so that teachers can spend time focusing on the things that are more specific to a question or an area of need that a student might express. Actually, now that you tell me that, it’s only supposed to offer you two examples of questions. I may have to go back and look at the instructions because that’s not something that’s been happening with other users. The specific instructions that are there are to give you two examples and then to give you a response that basically says you should come up with your own questions.
Miller: I can say that I did ask it for a couple of different potential interview subjects, including an 80-year-old who has taken psilocybin for the first time as therapy. This is something that I did last year and for that, too, it gave me a whole list of questions. In your defense, perhaps it was providing one example of a question for each of five or six different categories of questions. So maybe that’s what I was thinking, but it did give me a whole list of questions.
And when I said, “what about a 4-year-old who had taken psilocybin for therapy,” then I was trying to trick it, and it basically said, whoa, whoa, whoa, you should talk to parents, you should talk to experts. So, I was surprised that you have trained it to understand something about the moral complexities of interviewing people who don’t have, say, informed consent to even be answering questions.
Madison: Absolutely. If you’ve got high school and middle school students using a tool like this, we’ve got to make sure that there are guard rails to protect from traveling into areas that are potentially troublesome for so many different reasons.
Miller: But to go back to what you see is the best or most ethical, in your phrase, use of this. I mean, how can educators combat the irresponsible use of these tools, whether it’s college or high school students, more or less using these tools to get around doing important work themselves?
Madison: Well, you know, Dave, people have been cheating since schools opened. There are people who’ve written answers on the palm of their hands and used all kinds of strategies. So that’s not something that I think is ever going to be completely solved. That being said, I think that, particularly at the college level, if you’ve got students who are making a financial investment in their education, we’d like to hope that they’re also interested in actually learning and improving their skills, as opposed to just checking the boxes and doing the minimum.
Anyone can go on ChatGPT, fake an assignment and come up with something that’s potentially passable or that can’t be detected. But that’s why, given that AI is here to stay, not going anywhere, we put our emphasis on designing tools that really promote thinking. And I’d love to hear some of the other responses that you got. Did you ask some other questions besides just the ones around questions or … ?
Miller: I did. Well, let’s turn to Sassy, because that’s the AI career coach that you helped to develop. So, first of all, what was the impetus for this? This is very different. This is not for journalism students or early career practitioners. This is for people as young as middle school to explore or learn about potential careers. So, what was the impetus for this?
Madison: We have a long relationship with the Oregon Department of Education, actually, through several of the ESDs [Education Service Districts], where we support the creation of all kinds of tools. We have a library of video resources called “Career Journeys,” that profile emerging young professionals. We have a website called “Career Connected Learning” that we helped develop over a two-year period with governmental funding. And this was an add-on. After I had the first experience with developing Murrow, it occurred to me that there are a lot of our youth, particularly in the state of Oregon, who are in rural communities, who don’t necessarily have the benefits of being close to Portland where there’s a wealth of internships and all kinds of experiences. Those kids, too, need their eyes open to potential pathways that they can pursue. So that’s how this tool … I actually prototyped it, then shared it with our colleagues at ODE and they liked what they saw. And we went from there.
Miller: And here, you can ask the AI things like, “I’m interested in robotics, what are possible career things?” Or, “I’m not a people person, what should I do?” Or, “I want to pay off my student loans quickly.” These are all questions that I asked and I am not a middle schooler, but I got back things that actually seem like relatively good advice – often open-ended and always saying,”Here are things to consider. Here are people you can talk to.”
What’s the early feedback that you’ve received from teachers, or maybe even more particularly from students, about their experience with this AI?
Madison: I gotta tell you – all positive. I haven’t heard any negative feedback. And I think, again, for a middle schooler, the idea of trying to think about what your future career might be can be quite daunting. It’s daunting for many of our undergraduates who are about to graduate. And so I think that one of the things it does, which is really helpful for young people, is often they’ll have experiences, like maybe they were a camp counselor or they did some something that they don’t necessarily realize that they can articulate in a way in a resume that shows leadership or some other skill base that employers are interested in. So that’s one of the key things that it helps them do.
Also, I think that, truth be known, a lot of our students come to school with interests that aren’t necessarily acknowledged in a traditional sense of education as being career opportunities. Like, a typical teenage boy who loves video games may not realize that OSU and some of our community colleges have degree programs. You can make a lot of money developing video games. There are lots of companies that are based here in Oregon that are potential employers, but they may not even know about it. unless they have an opportunity to explore and look at aligning their interest with potential career pathways.
Miller: Broadly, where do you hope to see AI in educational spaces in the coming years and where do you not want to see it?
Madison: Wow. That’s a big question. I want to see …
Miller: It came from me. Maybe if I’d asked AI, it would have given me a more pointed, clear question. I apologize.
Madison: [Laughter] I mean, I think it would be a shame if … You know, before GPS, we used maps to have a sense of how to get from one place to another. Now, we’re very much dependent on that technology to even go to places we may have even been before. I think that it would be a shame if the ability to write, or at least the desire to write, were lost because of these tools, because of some of the more off the shelf, easily accessible tools. I mean, we’re now seeing AI built into the Apple Operating System, so you can click a button and it can rewrite an email for you five or six different ways. I think that what we don’t want is for young people, and even adults, to become passive and lazy, quite honestly.
Miller: Ed, I look forward to talking again. Thanks very much.
Madison: Thank you.
Miller: Ed Madison is the executive director and co-founder of the Journalistic Learning Initiative. He’s also an associate professor at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.
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