Doctoral Candidate Examines AI from Student, Instructor Perspective

By Joan Slattery Wall

You would expect a John Glenn College of Public Affairs student to debate the pros and cons of various public policies. What might surprise you is who is sometimes on the opposite side of the discussion.

Doctoral candidate Brandon Frye said that when he was preparing for doctoral candidacy exams, it was not unusual to find him walking around his house having a conversation with artificial intelligence. He’d ask ChatGPT or other AI tools to give him a position on a topic, and then he’d argue that position was wrong and offer his reasoning.

“It would be a back and forth. It forced me to think broadly,” Frye said. “It was more pushing me to develop my conceptual understanding.”

He has seen AI from an undergraduate student perspective and now, as a PhD teaching assistant, how it is changing classroom instruction. AI can be beneficial in creating unique learning opportunities and assignments, but it is also raising challenges, he points out.

“Are students actually grasping the material, or are they relying on AI?” he said, which makes student assessment difficult. “It’s hard to teach students, in my opinion, how to discern all that’s being thrown at them by AI. We have to understand this information ourselves and then explain it to them.”

His research with Associate Professor Megan LePere-Schloop explores AI integration into public organizations and then examines how to apply those results to nonprofit questions, particularly housing.

For example, he said, a lot of housing organizations are starting to push for AI, especially in regard to property management. 

“If you go on an apartment website, they usually have a chatbot you can talk to about inquiries, particularly if you have a forward-facing management company,” he said. “But are there downsides to it as well? Does it have the ability to really understand a situation? A lot of people are afraid of it and don’t understand it or trust it. If you need to use a chatbot and you don’t trust it or you don’t know how to use it, are you not submitting a request now?”

The research, he said, recognizes that a lot of AI has developed to improve efficiency. But that’s not always the goal for public organizations.

Frye, a research intern for the Ohio Housing Finance Agency, plans to write his dissertation on the role of low-income housing tax credit and the development of affordable housing. He’s passionate about public policy because of the significant positive and negative effects of its implementation.

“That led me to study policy — to find ways we can implement it better. I think of it more as a field of inquiry. I find myself passionate in teaching others and helping others how to understand it: what policy is implemented and how policy affects us,” Frye said. “I’m really interested in teaching. It doesn’t have to necessarily be in the classroom; it could be talking to practitioners and having more of a public impact.”

Read the latest edition of Public Address, the Glenn College magazine.