ASU Atomic Rips a Page from the WebinarTV Playbook

Way to go Sun Devils! 404 Media is sizzling with coverage these days, with today’s spotlight where I spent much time 1987-1992, Arizona State University (though I di not think the 404 folks are zeroing in on the Geology department or whatever they call it now). But holy chili peppers, ASU Atomic is hot. Arizona State University rolled out a platform called Atomic that creates AI-generated modules based on lectures taken from ASU faculty by cutting long videos down to very short clips then generating text and sections based on those clips. Faculty and scholars I spoke to whose lectures are included in Atomic are disturbed by their lectures being used in this way—as out-of-context, extremely short clips some cases—and several said they felt blindsided or angered by the launch. Most say they weren’t notified by the school and found out through word of mouth. And the testing I and others did on Atomic showed academically weak and even inaccurate content. Not only did ASU allegedly not…