In December 2022, my first experience with AI was using ChatGPT to write a blog article about social media marketing. I’d been practicing and teaching social media for over a decade, yet ChatGPT wrote an impressive and scary good article in less than a minute – something that may have take me hours!

How’d you feel after you first used ChatGPT? Since then I’ve had ups and downs with Generative AI. From full embrace and cautious integration to dystopian fear and overt avoidance. It’s been a long journey, but I’ve learned much along the way.

The end of the year is a time for reflection.

What I find I need at the end of a long hard year is a pep talk. Anyone else? December alone gifted us “12 days of OpenAI” and major updates from most AI companies like Google, Anthropic, Perplexity, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and xAI. I’m still trying to process what just happened in my Fall classes and I have just two weeks for any Spring updates.

I can relate to what AI expert Ethan Molick says in his latest Substack,

“This isn’t steady progress – we’re watching AI take uneven leaps past our ability to easily gauge its implications. And this suggests that the opportunity to shape how these technologies transform your field exists now when the situation is fluid, and not after the transformation is complete.”

University faculty are woefully behind.

I’ve accomplished much since Fall 2022: Two books, four research articles, three conference presentations, a top teaching paper award, and multiple AI presentations to professionals and faculty. Yet, negatives have me losing sight of the positives.

This fall my LinkedIn feed felt full of posts and comments about how far behind university professors are in AI. I know critiques are valid. In my first adjunct appointment in 2009, a media professor still didn’t teach the Internet because “it was a fad.” Like any profession dinosaurs exist.

University faculty are leading AI adoption.

However, the profs I mostly interact with are working hard to learn and keep up. For every head-in-the-sand professor, there are plenty trying to keep their heads above water with the pace of AI change. My workload has increased with AI not decreased.

So it’s hard to read comments that generalize us all as behind and advocate for replacing us with AI teaching agents. The profs I follow, like Ethan Molick, aren’t just teaching but innovating the use of AI in education and their professional disciplines.

Professors are old and boring.

Despite many more positive comments and evidence of grads excelling, human tendency is to focus on the negative. Years ago, I got a student comment,

“I can’t believe someone old enough to be my dad is teaching me about social media.”

Another student once told me I need to update my headshot because I don’t look the website photo. Then there’s the student who said my voice is monotone and boring. Ouch.

Despite being in the minority those comments still hurt and I have trouble forgetting them years later, but why?

Professors have wisdom from experience.

Does age equate to being behind? I have a much bigger picture of the world and have lived through many waves of tech advancements. I’ve also spent nearly two decades practicing marketing and now a decade researching and teaching it. A week ago I received this comment from a student,

“My academic background in marketing, particularly courses in social media marketing and digital, laid a solid foundation for this internship. Concepts learned in these courses proved instrumental in creating effective social media posts. Without these courses, my social content would have not been as effective or efficient.”

Great right? Yes, but I still struggle to get the negative out of my head. I know I’m not auditioning for America’s Got Talent, so why can’t I let it go? Human brains have a negative bias. We all tend to engage, emphasize, and focus on the negative. It is something social algorithms take advantage of to keep us scrolling.

So thanks to the grad from two years ago who gave me a LinkedIn shout-out for my project management software and HubSpot certificate integrations. And to the student graduating this spring who has already been hired into her dream sports marketing job, who thanked me for what she learned in my digital marketing class to get her there.

We need grace, humility, and confidence.

Constructive criticism is key to learning and advancement, but you also can’t take it too much to heart. You’ll either be so discouraged you give up or you’ll become too timid to experiment for fear of the negative. I am in that in that moment right now.

I apologize to students and professionals in my field for the ways I was behind in AI advancement or days I wasn’t always engaging. Hopefully, there is room for grace. I’m also humble enough to take the things I can improve upon and implement them in this short window before next semester. To do this I need a boost of confidence.

So this is a pep talk to those profs and professionals who don’t have their head in the sand. You’re trying to keep your head above the water. I’m striving for humility to learn from critiques, grace for my failings, and confidence to head into the Spring semester – with the audacity to teach digital and social media marketing in my early 50s.

We need to be more human, more bold.

Speaking of audacious. It’s the motivation for the main article image generated by Google’s ImageFX. My prompt? Show a university professor burning AI inspired by Fahrenheit 451. My human fireworks to not become replaced by AI teaching agents or young YouTubers selling top 10 strategies for social media success. Marketing thought leader Mark Schaefer inspired the image saying,

“AI has helped create a marketing pandemic of dull. It’s not your fault. Your company probably rewards you for being boring. You’re Google-sufficient and optimized. They’re trying to keep you in their box. But the AI bots are coming. You need to do something, and you need to do it now. It’s time to unleash the HUMAN fireworks in your content. There is no choice. You need to be audacious.”

Thanks for leading us to the future Mark (someone older than me). This is my audacious post that couldn’t be written by AI. AI can’t explain what it feels like to be a professor at this moment. AI can’t know what it is to fear its own adoption. AI can’t know what it is to have grace, humility, and confidence. Google’s AI Overview did give a nice definition though,

“A state of being confident in one’s abilities while also acknowledging limitations and approaching situations with kindness and respect.”

In bold confidence we also need caution.

While we have no choice in adopting AI, we chose how. Human agency still exists. I don’t want to make the mistakes we made with social media. Have you read Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation?

Between my period of AI avoidance (pushing off meetings with faculty development) to AI embrace (agreeing to a 5 part AI integration workshop), I had to create a framework and process to strategically apply AI.

“Move fast and break things” may have helped develop AI, but I’d rather not. A benefit of academia that I didn’t have in the fast-paced ad agency world was time for thoughtful reflection. Successful marketing is based on frameworks and processes. I needed that for AI integration. The result was my summer AI blog series:

1. Artificial Intelligence Use: A Framework For Determining What Tasks To Outsource To AI [Template]
2. AI Task Framework: Examples of What I’d Outsource To AI And What I Wouldn’t.
3. AI Prompt Framework: Improve Results With This Framework And Your Expertise [Template].
4. More Than Prompt Engineers: Careers With AI Require Subject Matter Expertise [Infographic].
5. Joy Interrupted: AI Can Distract From Opportunities For Learning And Human Connection.

How I integrated AI in Fall classes.

Coming out of summer I went through every class and assignment to specifically look for places where I felt AI would be helpful for student learning and where it would not. I tried AI for tasks in my assignments and shared what I found with students.

Each assignment had an AI section giving students specific aspects of the assignment to use AI and how. There was no general ban, but also no all-out use. Using AI for everything shortchanges the learning process as the infographic below illustrates.

I also had a consistent general AI statement on my syllabi (see below). I directed students on when and how to cite AI, and what AI to use with links and directions to use it. I sent them to Copilot for convenience and financial considerations as all students had access to GPT-4 and DALL-E 3 free with their university Microsoft 365 account.

I cautioned about AI copyright issues. I also didn’t want them using AI to complete an entire assignment – why I use Turnitin’s AI checker. I never used it solely, but citing 10 print-only marketing books not assigned nor found online is a key second sign.

Academia isn’t the only one using AI detection. A digital marketing professional guest speaker last term told students they use AI in many ways but use AI detectors for their writers. If a client is paying for human-created content, they want to ensure it.

Student uses of AI in assignments.

AI helped students brainstorm and express their ideas. Groups in Integrated Marketing Communications created campaigns for brands like Qdoba. In a class of little graphic design or art students, DALL-E through a Copilot account enabled them to create a fully customized storyboard of their 30-second TV ads and 6-second YouTube bumper ads.

This also allowed us to talk about how AI content is okay to sell ideas. However, there are potential copyright issues with publishing AI content. There is also a potential backlash from consumers as highlighted in recent Adage articles and Harris Polls.

In social media marketing, students used AI to generate variations of social content captions. The social media simulation requires many organic posts that must vary (as in real social content). Students wrote the main message but let AI create versions to word counts for each social platform. For a brand’s social strategies, they used AI to research influencers, get hashtag ideas, and create images to mock up brand social media posts.

I taught them prompts to get better results. Using the prompt framework below got me and my students much better results. I heard from colleagues at other universities who are using this framework for their students and getting better results as well.

What’s to come for the new year?

In my next post, I’ll share what I am planning for the Spring. Recent AI developments have opened up possibilities. I plan on using NotebookLM as an AI tutor for one class. I’ll go beyond Copilot to leverage new AI capabilities in Adobe Express and Google’s ImageFX. I’ll get deeper into the new multimodal capabilities of AI with videos exploring live audio interactions with NotebookLM’s Audio Overview and a demonstration of live video and conversations with Gemini 2.0 as it “sees” what‘s on my screen.

What have been your struggles and successes with AI?

100% Human Created!