Editor’s note: Engineering SOURCE (Jana Crouch) spoke with Teaching Associate Professor Dan Baker about his advocacy for the use of AI and then experimented with three different AI tools in organizing notes from his interview. This article is written from her perspective.

As the communications manager for Civil and Environmental Engineering, I have the privilege of routinely interviewing faculty in the department. Dan Baker stays busy, so I was not surprised to catch him briefly between meeting with engineering student peer mentors and teaching a class. When he sat down in my office to discuss artificial intelligence, he cut right to the chase.

“I hate taking meeting notes,” he tells me. “It’s one of my least favorite things to do.”

Rather than taking notes at a recent meeting, he instead used an AI transcription tool to convert audio to text, reorganize topics, provide a summary, and outline the necessary action items and deliverables from the discussion. Baker has become a resident expert on incorporating AI in an engineering classroom and into our professional lives to lighten the load, a growing emphasis on the CSU campus.

“Why not have AI do fundamentally boring tasks, allowing humans to engage on a more creative level? I want AI to do the things I don’t want to do, so I have more time to do the things I want to do.”

Barely able to look up from the keyboard as I typed while he spoke, I couldn’t help but think he might be on to something.

A teacher of teachers

Baker delivered the keynote address titled “Unlocking the Power of AI: A Playbook for Students and Educators” at Engineering Exploration Day: Educator’s Edition earlier this month. The audience consisted primarily of teachers, guidance counselors, and other education professionals across the state.

Baker provided methods for using AI to save time in daily tasks and to aid in getting “unstuck” from lesson planning and writer’s block.

“AI can expand your brainstorming,” said Baker. “If I want to do an activity in class, I’m limited by what I am familiar with. If I ask AI to list 10 class activities, I may find two or three options I didn’t know about, but it’s still up to me to decide which is the best option and how to implement it.”

He also advocated for introducing AI tools to students through coursework, while training them how to use AI ethically and responsibly.

“The reality is our students are going to work in a different world than we have worked in,” said Baker. “It would be a disservice not to prepare them to live and work in a world where AI is ubiquitous. As part of our land-grant mission, it is our role to educate the state of Colorado.”

AI in action

As Baker leaves my office, he encourages me to use AI to organize and summarize my notes from our conversation. Using the prompt “Can you correct and reorganize this” followed by a section of my poorly typed notes, I received three substantially different summaries in a matter of seconds: