While the rest of the world was preparing for the ascendancy of Donald Trump, or trying to avoid it through long stints of gazing out to sea from the verandah of an over-priced beach house, one of Australia’s pre-eminent AI gurus Danny Liu spent January unleashing a new paper sketching out five essential areas of action’ for institutions in 2025.
Professor Liu and the University of British Colombia’s Simon Bates developed a model for AI integration which is bound to succeed at least in part because it uses a hitherto underutilised acronym – CRAFT, standing for Culture, Rules, Familiarity, Access and Trust.
Culture “represents both the deepest challenge and greatest opportunity,” Professor Liu writes – institutions need to encourage and facilitate collegial debate about the university’s role in an AI-enabled world. This point recognises that the AI debate is far more than just about new rules relating to cheating – but preparing to accept that the role and position of universities must change in response to the new technology.
Rules argues for a move from stick to carrot and stick, allowing space to use AI within specific spaces and contexts. “The absence of rules leads to unsafe, secret, or shameful use of AI, and degrades trust between people,” Professor Liu writes.
The remaining action areas are reasonably self-explanatory – expanding access and equity of access to the technology; encouraging familiarity (a polite way of describing approaches to re-educating luddites so they too can get on board) and a circle of trust, which must be built ‘through transparency, collaboration and demonstrated value.”
This is powerful reading for those returning to work, or still sneaking another couple of days of sun in the budgy smugglers.
