By ELISA TURNER
Artificial intelligence is evolving at a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pace. Many of us remember goofing off when we first got classroom iPads, going on Cleverbot and having some semblance of a realistic conversation with it— that is until it would start to insist it was human. Your friends would tell the teacher you were communicating with unseen consciousnesses, getting the class iPads permanently banned. Needless to say, 2014 was not the peak of AI.
But here we are, a decade later, with ChatGPT at our fingertips, standing right at the brink of exponential growth. We’ve gone from the Glasgow “Willy Wonka Experience” incident to the incorporation of AI into our daily lives. Sure, it was all fun and games when you could go online and make the cast of South Park sing Bohemian Rhapsody. But there is something to be said about where we stand now with AI, and its incorporation into the future. Is it a passing update in technology, or is it here to stay? How is it used ethically or unethically? Will it take the jobs we’re working so hard to get after graduation? I’ve turned to experienced professors and a fellow student to answer these questions.
Professor Tamara Ketabgian has been a professor at Beloit College for 20 years now, and is currently the William and Gayle Keefer Chair of Humanities. Professor Ketabgian does not allow AI in her classroom— her prohibition of classroom AI usage comes from two places of concern. ”I don’t think that people are really learning in [humanities] when they use it,” says Professor Ketabgian. “And I also feel very strongly about intellectual property… I think it’s so problematic, because I view [AI] as a mass of plagiarism… it’s just using and reproducing all of this sampled material, and it’s not putting it in quotes, it doesn’t cite sources, it also makes up things… So that doesn’t help the learning process.”
Professor Ketabgian’s apprehension about AI in academia comes from concern for students’ learning and concern for intellectual property. However, she doesn’t dismiss AI’s usefulness as a tool. “I may change my views in the future,” says Ketabgian. “My views on Wikipedia, for instance, have kind of evolved… I tell my students that they shouldn’t cite Wikipedia… they should follow up the specific references and assess them, evaluate them, and assess those sources. If OpenAI… was a responsible tool that respected intellectual property, you could do a similar thing with it. But we can’t, because we have no idea where the materials come from, and how it’s been manipulated… it’s all completely opaque to us.” While Professor Ketabgian presently forbids the use of AI in her humanities classes, she may be open minded to its ethical usage in the future, after more development.
I also spoke with Dr. Allison Nickel of the Beloit psychology department, whose views contrast with those of Professor Ketabgian. “Generally speaking, I am okay with my students using AI,” says Dr. Nickel. “It’s not a place where you would use it to write your whole paper, but if it’s something that you know nothing about, it’ll give you a lot of general information… So you can definitely use it to make your work more efficient.”
Dr. Nickel also recognizes AI’s development in the field of psychology, referencing labs that serve to find whether AI can emulate human creativity and memory. “Right now they’re actually trying to use ChatGPT to solve psych riddles… it’s the Remote Associates Test. So you’re given three words… [that] are related in some way, and you need to come up with the fourth word that ties them all together. So they’re trying to see if ChatGPT can solve those riddles the same way that a human would.” While Dr. Nickel is okay with AI usage in the classroom and appreciates how far it’s come in the past year, she admits that she was initially skeptical about AI. “We’ve been kind of aware of it for a long time. I’ve always been a little bit skeptical of it, just because… anything that’s, you know, the next computer thing to save the world. I’m like, yeah, but you say this every year.” Despite her previous skepticism, Dr. Nickel appreciates AI’s development and is curious to see how it will develop in the near future, saying “I think it’s something that’s going to be here to stay, and we’re going to have to figure out how to use it. I don’t think it’s going to disappear anytime soon.”
To gain a student perspective, I also interviewed Claire Winter ‘28, a Beloit College freshman, who has some strong opinions about AI in the workforce and in education. “There are certain broad industries where I think AI as a whole should be banned,” says Winter. “You know how the food industry cannot use any CGI in advertisements? … I think the same thing should apply to the entertainment industry specifically.” While Winter doesn’t support the exploitation of AI in corporations, she is indifferent about its usage on campus. Winter has never used AI on assignments but says “There’s this obsession with students using AI... Well, maybe if the job industry wasn’t rigged for you to have to get through this insane amount of hoops for one thing, when… a college degree is more financial strain than it ever has been— using something to ensure you’re able to pass your classes… I don’t see what’s so terrible about it.”
While Winter has never used AI for academic purposes, she has used AI outside of school. “I’ve used AI to generate emails to financial offices,” she says. “AI is great at doing soulless sh*t… and that’s what I use it for. ” Claire Winter sympathizes with the use of AI as a safety net, never having done so herself, but draws the line when AI starts to take jobs from people. This raises the burning question on all of our minds— is that where AI’s headed next?
Students across the country are breaking their backs and going into debt to get degrees that are supposed to help us get jobs. But when AI has more capacity in its database than we have in our brains, students are scared they’ll have to beat the qualifications of a computer just to get an interview. Is it possible that our careers will be outsourced to automation? I’ve given the magic 8-ball a shake and, drumroll please, my sources say no.
“Machines don’t have the same type of logic tools that humans do. So we can see an image on our retina, and it’s ambiguous, right? It could be a piece of paper or it could be a trapezoid tilted in space, but the image that’s on our eye is the same. Machines, all they see is the page. So to us, it means something— To a machine, it’s ambiguous,” says Dr. Nickel of the psychology department. “There is so much AI out there, that eventually I think it’s going to start cannibalizing itself and there it will be like gobbledygook… There’s just going to be so much noise out there that actually you’re still really, really going to need human beings to be able to distinguish between what is true and what is false,” says Professor Ketabgian from the humanities. “I feel like there’s something AI cannot replicate in writing, and honestly if you’re writing something… I’d like to see you put your [passion and experience] into it, and AI doesn’t have any [passion nor experience] to put into it… It’s basically churning out word vomit,” says Claire Winter, going into further detail— “ We’ve made it look like there’s a lot more happening than there is, and that’s fooling a lot of dumb*ss white men who are working in corporate offices who believe that they can just fill [positions] with AI, thinking it’s gonna be so much more efficient. But at the end of the day, you’re gonna start having issues, where AI doesn’t know how to do its job properly… I think we’ll get there, and then there will be a massive breakdown in corporate firms that have switched almost entirely over to AI. I think we will see them start to crumble, and I will be there to drink tequila and laugh.”
AI has shortcomings in logic, reasoning, and human passion— gaps that only organic intelligence can fill. That being said, we have the responsibility to set a precedent in academia— even when there’s an essay you don’t want to write, or hours of interview audio you don’t want to sift through, we have the obligation to choose to do our work using our own intelligence rather than an algorithm. As the people who will become hiring managers in the not-so-distant future, we must choose not to outsource our work to AI now, so that we will not outsource our jobs to AI in the future.
Later down the line, it is possible that some manager will deliberate between giving their fellow man a career and saving a few bucks by enlisting AI. For the sake of my own sanity, I have to believe they will choose their fellow man. But tonight, you will deliberate between giving yourself a hand cramp typing out that essay you forgot was due, and opening ChatGPT. For the sake of my own sanity, I have to believe you will choose the hand cramp.
Featured Image Credit: Chronicle.com
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