Dr. Stephanie Laggini Fiore, Associate Vice Provost and Sr. Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, hosts a faculty teaching circle on artificial intelligence on Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2023, at Temple University in Philadelphia. Educators say they want to embrace the technology’s potential to teach and learn in new ways, but when it comes to assessing students, they see a need to “ChatGPT-proof” test questions and assignments. (AP Photo/Joe Lamberti)
Dr. Stephanie Laggini Fiore, Associate Vice Provost and Sr. Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, hosts a faculty teaching circle on artificial intelligence on Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2023, at Temple University in Philadelphia. Educators say they want to embrace the technology’s potential to teach and learn in new ways, but when it comes to assessing students, they see a need to “ChatGPT-proof” test questions and assignments. (AP Photo/Joe Lamberti)
Aired; August 14th, 2024.
Artificial Intelligence also known as A.I. for short is a set of technologies that enable computers to perform a variety of advanced functions, including the ability to see, understand and translate spoke and written language, analyze data, and make recommendations and more according to google cloud.
Many professions are utilizing this tool, and colleges are integrating it into their courseloads this fall. Professor Carrie Sipes is the Department Chair and Professor of the Communications, Journalism, and Media Department at Shippensburg University. She encourages her students to use A.I.
“I love encouraging students to use AI during their brainstorming sessions of their projects, right? It can really streamline ideas. It can give you more ideas to consider. So if you put in a prompt and an AI software, you can come up with a lot of ideas for a project. And then you could use your brain to build out 1 or 2 of those ideas, to see which one is the one that you think is the best choice for you at this time.”
Jeff Ritchie is the Chair and Professor of Design, Media, and Technology at Lebanon Valley College. Ritchie says although it could be helpful, it could be utilized in an unethical manner.
“It also can be used to cheat and to misrepresent, as your own thought something. So again, I think is carried spoke to before. You know, a lot of our existing laws and practices are predicated on technologies. You know, the printing press brought about the idea of intellectual property rights. I don’t know what these laws will look like, when AI is there, you know, do we share ownership or, you know, so much is up in the air right now about how we will decide to proceed, with these legal, ethical and just policy-based decisions.”
Professor Sipes teaches a course called Digital Tools, and A.I. related tools for photography and videography will be among the courseload.
“But it’s more for a creative the creative process and creative outcomes for the work that they’ll create in that course. Certainly, there’s lots of conversations about, like I mentioned earlier, you know, what is plagiarism? What it you know, when it comes to AI, what is you know, if you’re going to turn in work that’s used AI, what’s required for you to to do that in order to not, you know, fall into the plagiarism category or, have high scores on, ChatGPT or GPT zero, etc.. Kind of scan of work.”
However, even if A.I. is used to cheat on assignments, Professor Sipes says professors can always tell if the student has used A.I. to write an entire assignment.
“You can you can tell almost immediately by reading the first few sentences, if it’s using words that people just don’t use, it’s it doesn’t have that human element to it, even though it’s based on, you know, the algorithms that are pulling all of this content together. So, we’re definitely having conversations like that with students that I would rather see you as student submit work that has some errors in it. You’re 18, 19, 20 years old. Like, that’s what we’re expecting to see. We’re not expecting to see error free. But we also want it to see that we want you to show that human personality that you have. And so I think emphasizing those kinds of things and, and letting students know, like, look, we’re watching for these things too, and we want you to use these things in an ethical way is, is a conversation we have pretty regularly.”
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