Encouraging Deep Learning in the Age of AI with Mark Young

S. Mark Young studies management control system design in entertainment. His book, The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America, is a New York Times Best Seller. Young holds the George Bozanic and Holman G. Hurt Chair in Sports and Entertainment Business at the Marshall School of Business. He teaches The Business of Digital Hollywood and Management and Organization of the Creative Industries.

Q: Most of the students taking your classes about entertainment are not film students but instead are in business, communication, or other majors. How do you teach these students, who may be a little more disconnected from the creative industries, about AI in the entertainment space?

In my teaching, I always want to give a historical context to everything I do. For movies, I want to go all the way back to silent films. In music, I want to take students back to the 50s, 60s, and 70s, so they can hear the music, understand the context of the music, and learn why it came about the way it did. I think only then are you able to kind of have a fuller picture of how music and movies and television have evolved. Let’s say I started with just Marvel films. There'd be no anchor except for that. So if I said, what about all those great films like To Kill a Mockingbird and the Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman films…How do you compare those to what we see today? If you don't know any of that stuff, the answer is, well, I don't know how to compare it. With the introduction of disruptive technology like AI, it's even more important to teach history. I think a lot of people don't know what they're missing. You don't get the nuances or the context if you don't see those movies for yourself or listen to that music yourself. And so I would hate to see Gen Z and future generations like Gen Alpha feel like they really understand the media they consume without giving them the opportunity to look back.

Q: Since you teach both graduates and undergraduates, have you noticed any interesting trends arising with this emerging tech?

In the beginning, when I first started teaching, I think there was a bigger difference between the grad students and the undergrads. But I think that working with technology and social media is actually bringing those different groups closer and closer together because now they have more of a common bond. Social media tends to be a central point where those groups can converge, so they're able to speak the same language and shorthand much more easily than they ever could before. And it's the same with older generations. You can now talk to a grandma who's looking at TikTok. She's out there dancing.

Q: How do students use generative AI in your classes?

A lot of students say, “Well, I only use AI to write the first introductory paragraph of my paper.” My response is that's absolutely the wrong way to go because writing the introduction paragraph is the hardest thing in the paper. So if you go back and have an AI program do the hard work of coming up with the

thesis for you, you've changed yourself intellectually. If you start letting these programs do the thinking for you, then you are short-changing yourself in terms of your own intellectual growth. You cannot skip steps when you're trying to develop a young intellect. There's nothing better than a student who is getting a C in my class, who I then say to them, you have to study harder here, focus on this area, read this article, and they end up doing really well in the class because they work so hard. There's nothing more rewarding for me as a faculty member than to see that intellectual growth. Now, I'm not saying that you're not going to get anything from using these tools, but I'm worried that a lot of the hard work and intellectual growth is going to be done for you.

Q: What are your main concerns with how AI is impacting your students and Gen Z as a whole?

The main concern I have is whether [Gen Z] will have a strong appreciation for the past. They're much better than any other generation in terms of technological literacy. But the knowledge that they have is a mile wide but sometimes only an inch deep. I always believe that as a person, you should master something. If you just understand the surface of everything, it's not really a skill. You haven't really developed the intellectual discipline to be a main contributor because you haven't drilled deep enough. So really my main thing is to really make sure my students have a deep understanding of the past, so they can apply that as they move forward and as AI only becomes more prevalent in their lives.