With tools such as ChatGPT and Grammarly, generative AI has never been so easy to use. Simply entering prompts can produce paragraphs or entire essays in just a few seconds. Large language models, or generative language models trained on massive amounts of pre-existing text, are expected to grow in usage and become implemented in more everyday uses in the near future. However, what happens when these uses stretch into the academic sphere? Where does this leave students, faculty and staff working in fields where authentic writing is prioritized? If these tools borrow from pre-existing work, how much does generative AI border on plagiarizing? These burgeoning questions will find their answers in the coming years, but three faculty members shared their current thoughts on these tools.
Professor of English and Director of Writing Alexis Hart previously wrote a piece concerning the humanities and generative AI. In an interview, she expressed optimism, hoping students understand how to safely utilize AI in their own writing. To be a conscious user of these tools, Hart recommends realizing that they’re limited in their output as a result of their lack of lived experience.
Hart compared tools like ChatGPT to Wikipedia in its infancy, as both tools should be referred to as general reference sources. To rely on ChatGPT for all academic thinking and communication doesn’t advance the user’s writing or analytical capabilities when engaging in research. Hart thinks that students should be able to leave campus as critical users and be aware of the benefits and detriments of using AI to generate texts and other kinds of communication.
Department Chair and Frederick F. Steely Associate Professor of English Jennie Votava also spoke to the relevance of the tool, but voiced concerns about what creative processes might look like when it comes to generative AI. English professors have a lot of concerns about questions of plagiarism, and any branch of the college where students are doing writing, that should be their own personal writing. Votava has also done research on prompt engineering in preparation for her Literature and the Mind course being offered this semester.
Votava stresses that the tool cannot take the place of a student’s creative voice, which is noticeable in the repetitive nature of the predictive text. She thinks that if you tell students don’t use it at all, that seems like nonsense, but if you say, here are some ways you can use it potentially to do good things and here are places where you don’t want to use it, maybe that’s more productive. One useful way she recommends to use ChatGPT is to paraphrase difficult-to-understand texts, then comparing the result to your own interpretations to further develop your analytical skills.
Entrepreneur in Residence and the Co-Director of the Bruce R. Thompson Center For Business & Economics Chris Allison also weighed in on the conversation. He agreed that students should become proficient in using tools like ChatGPT while not completely replacing all creative input they may have. He raised the concern of hallucinations, or false citations that ChatGPT creates when looking for citations. Allison thinks that students should be told to disclose their use of generative AI, and that it’s a tool that can be used, but with transparency.
Allison, who was CEO of Tollgrade Communications Inc. for nine years, said he had been utilizing artificial intelligence since the 1990s. He understood the significance of machine learning, but is also cautious about what specifically the tools are being used for. There’s a concern that people are using these tools for bad purposes, such as committing fraud or catfishing people. There’s a saying that locks are for honest people, and if someone has to abuse a piece of technology, they’re going to be able to abuse that piece of technology.
In the future, faculty are hopeful that rules and regulations can be formulated with nuance and understanding. The rules concerning generative AI could be most successful when decided upon by individual professors, taking into account their different concentrations and how the tools could aid students. Faculty think that there needs to be more dialogue so that professors really know what their students are doing, and that one way to achieve that is to have a really clear generative AI policy, where one of the stipulations of the policy is if students want to use generative AI, they should discuss it with their professors and decide what’s appropriate and not appropriate.
