AI Is Making Us Better Problem Solvers feat. Professor Jaeyeon Chung

Owl Have You Know

How is AI enhancing our creativity and problem solving and how does that compare to other digital tools we use everyday, like search engines?

Through controlled lab experiments and field studies, William S. Mackey Jr. Distinguished Assistant Professor Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung spends her time at Rice Business researching questions just like that. Her work in the field of marketing focuses on the groundbreaking innovations and psychological implications of AI’s growing role in our lives.

Jae joins host Maya Pomroy ’22 to chat about her journey from psychology to AI, her recent study on generative AI’s effectiveness in assisting human creativity, and her research that delves into how misinformation is spread through platforms like YouTube.

Episode Guide:

01:35 Journey from Psychology to AI

04:20 Academic and Professional Achievements

06:44 Why Rice University?

08:40 Teaching and Research at Rice

12:47 Exploring ChatGPT's Creativity

17:43 AI's Role in Empathy and Innovation

21:42 Concerns and Regulations Around AI

27:50 YouTube and Misinformation

34:05 Future Research and Projects

Owl Have You Know is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.

Episode Quotes:

Exploring Jaeyeon's recent study on AI and creativity

13:21: [Maya] You did a recent study about ChatGPT as a powerful tool for enhancing everyday creativity and problem-solving. So can you walk me through that experiment that you ran and through your study and your findings on that?

13:59: [Jaeyeon Chung] So, my curiosity stemmed from the fact that GPT may perform better than Google or human in subjective tasks. It seemed quite obvious that it does a great role, a great, great job in solving math problems or writing code, but would it be superior when it does a very subjective test, which is perceived as completely human? And that was the creativity test that a lot of people have been saying is a unique territory of humans that no machines can replace.

14:17: [Maya] With empathy. Empathy was one of the emotions that you studied, yes?

14:21: [Jaeyeon Chung] Right, right. And I was trying to challenge that assumption, and that's how I started to run a different set of experiments.

How Rice supports junior faculty with research funding

07:06: Rice has a great opportunity that the school is providing to junior faculty members for sure. I mean, as a person who has always been looking for, like, the best, Rice offers one of the best packages that all the scholars prefer to get in terms of the research funding. It's the research budget that they're really fully supportive of. So, for me, I'm running a lot of experiments; let's say that I pay $2 for a 10-minute survey. It's a very small amount of money, but if you are getting 2,000 participants to write a paper, that becomes a whole lot of money that I can't just like get from my own pocket. And the school needs to support that, but a lot of other schools required for a high-standard research without providing the adequate support, and Rice is the school that really provides all these detailed steps, and they really protect the junior faculty members to focus on what they're interested in.

Why mastering AI tools matters more than fearing replacement

27:06: I think understanding a broader aspect of how the industry works is critical for humans to fully have control over GPT and to use it as a tool to develop their careers further rather than replacing it here or there. So you shouldn't be worried about yourself being replaced by AI, but you should be worried about losing a job because of a person who better uses AI.

Show Links:

• Transcript
  
  

Guest Profiles:

• Jaeyeon Chung | Rice Business