Students and Professors Raise Their Concerns While AI Creeps Further Into Higher Education

Like it or not, AI is here, and has already been here for a while now, and it is leaving students at WSUV conflicted between its convenience and its risks.

WSUV student Tiffany said that “It’s definitely going to do a lot of harm in the future . . . we’re relying on it for everything, no matter how much we say it’s just helping us out.”

Multiple students have reported using AI as tools for learning. Morgan Ludwig-Pessa, a WSUV student, said that she has increasingly been using AI chatbots, saying that “sometimes Google doesn’t really help me in the way that I’m wanting. ChatGPT explains it out step-by-step and works through concepts.” 

Some professors have already begun introducing assignments that include the use of AI. Dr. Gunjan Gakhar, a biology professor of Ludwig-Pessa, has included prompts to use for assignments,  “so it puts up walls for the AI on what to tell us and not tell us.” She explains that being taught “how to use it as a tool rather than something to get out of an assignment for” is crucial to ethical AI use in the classroom.

Dr. Iván González-Soto raises the question ”Why are we being told that we should be more efficient?” 

Dr. González-Soto urges his students “to take a step back and think… What’s the longer history of this? Can we decouple it… from these other historical examples when people in positions of power have tried to apply these technologies to cut back on the labor force.” 

He ties this point to the idea that “machines don’t talk back. If everything is automated, machines aren’t going to ask for a raise, they’re not gonna strike, or complain. They’re just gonna do the job.” 

Dr. González-Soto goes further to express that college is a time to develop soft skills that will aid graduates in the workforce. He said that his own professors told him that “people will hire you for your ideas, what you bring to the table, how you think. If a lot of the critical thinking is exported to a program that does that for you, then in-person when you’re talking to people, it’s not there. You haven’t practiced that skill.” 

WSUV student Raymah Shaikh recalls being taught how to find credible sources through Google and said that students need to understand “that AI is not always factual, it hallucinates . . . [we] shouldn’t take everything it says as fact.”

Ultimately, Shaikh said that she believes AI can be a helpful tool in speeding up processes and automating the grunt work of a project, “but at the same time, I think we’re valuing human-made work a lot less than we did before, and I’m kind of sad to see how it’s changing live-performance spaces… and the value in physical art as well.”