UW Oshkosh’s Artificial Intelligence & Data Analytics Club’s mission is to create a community of individuals who are interested in learning, exploring, and applying the latest developments in these cutting-edge fields.

The club started in Dec. of 2022 and had their first meeting in the spring semester. President of the club, Mario Biendarra said that the club had 120 students attend through two meetings.

Biendarra said that the club’s meetings focus on proper student application of AI.

“We had topics like, why not to use Chat GPT for math or how to use it to generate frameworks as opposed to using it entirely,” he said. “We show how AI can be used effectively because you still need human input.”

He said that the club also looks forward to the development of AI and will even feature an addition to UWO’s academics.

“We also have meetings on the future of AI,” he said. “There’s a new school of informatics being built right now and we had the College of Business dean come and talk about that. Oshkosh is the first college to have that school in the state.”

If you failed to attend the introductory meeting, Vice President Jonah Hayes said that you shouldn’t be discouraged from future attendance, due to the importance of the subject matter.

“Don’t feel intimidated and if you’re uncomfortable we encourage you to show up anyways,” he said. “AI is important in every field going into the future.”

Despite all of the concepts sounding overwhelming, the club still boasts high attendance. Biendarra said that this is due to the importance of diversity in developing these programs.

“Something that helps with those numbers is that despite AI sounding scary, we want people from all over the college to come,” he said. “AI is going to affect everybody, this club is not about programming, but using AI to leverage an advantage for yourself.”

He said that if it’s going to be a system of the future, it needs to work past current inequalities.

“This is for everybody,” Biendarra said. “We need people to learn how it works, we don’t make systems of the future that will automate the current inequalities that we have.”

Hayes said that already the club is off to a strong start and is open to any student who’s interested in the subject matter.

“I’m really happy with how the club is going this semester,” he said. “We’re all really excited for what the semester has to bring… we’d love to see anyone there who has an inkling of interest about AI.”

The first meeting will be collaborative with the Computer Science club on Oct. 24, at 5:30 in Sage Hall, room 1216. The meeting will feature discussions on AI ethical issues, large language models and AI’s potential impact on the future. 

One of the issues that’s being presented is ownership of AI generated information, which Hayes said offers an interesting ethical dilemma.

“If you generate part of a paper through Chat GPT and you use that part of the paper that it generated, do you own that,” he said. “Or does the company that owns the model? Do you have to credit the AI?”

Covering who owns the work that AI generates. If you generate part of a paper through CHAT GPT and you use that part of the paper that it generated, do you own that? Or does the company that owns the model? Do you have to credit the AI?