Annika Culver, a professor of East Asian history at Florida State University, was reviewing one of her student’s essay assignments when she noticed that it sounded “too sophisticated” and robotic. I noticed.
When we ran the text through a detection tool, it revealed that 49% of the sentences were generated by artificial intelligence, known as AI.
“When students read papers that use AI, something feels strange.Each sentence looks great and sounds great, but everything feels fluffy and doesn’t actually say anything. There’s a weird quote at the end,” Culver said. . “You can pretty much tell when students are using it, and then they’ll confess.”
With artificial intelligence at the top of the conversation in higher education, FSU and Florida A&M University are exploring the current state of AI on campus and how to move forward with the rapidly emerging, but fraught, presence of the technology. We are moving forward with initiatives.
The capabilities of AI make the technology a pressing issue on a national scale as universities and other organizations grapple with ideas about privacy invasions and unethical shortcuts to success.
FSU created an advisory committee on artificial intelligence in education in July and is currently working on a generative AI policy that includes guidelines and principles for faculty to follow. The committee’s recommendations will be presented to the Faculty Senate and the Provost’s Office in December.
“What we need is to empower teachers to make their own decisions by providing appropriate guidelines, perhaps guiderails, on how to make informed choices, while at the same time making AI effective and ethical.” “It gives students the skills they need to use it effectively,” he said. FSU Associate Professor of Academic Innovation Paul Marty is also a professor in the university’s School of Information Studies.
Similarly, FAMU announced Thursday that it has established a 20-member Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee to evaluate the integration of AI in classrooms and programs across campus.
The university will have a policy to protect FAMU from infringement on personal and professional uses of AI, while an advisory committee will consider ways to foster AI in teaching and learning settings. The multidisciplinary group plans to begin meetings early next year.
“This AI Council brings together thought leaders from all fields, from the arts, humanities and social sciences to STEM fields and engineering,” said Alison Watson, FAMU provost and vice president for academic affairs. I did. “We want faculty to embrace the good that AI brings, and to be aware of some of the factors that can be harmful.”
What is AI? What are universities doing about it?
AI is an emerging technology in which machines are programmed to learn, reason, and perform in ways that mimic human intelligence, and data security is one of the primary drivers of university-wide AI policies.
If an AI platform receives information from an individual, such as financial data, and uses it as further training data, that information can later be included in answers given to another user.
According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, leaders at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts established a comprehensive AI policy last year to protect sensitive information. The process took several months and resulted in a three-page policy. We focus solely on data security.
In Florida, similar policies and guidelines are posted on the websites of state university system institutions such as Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, and the University of Florida. The University of Florida is home to the Interdisciplinary Informatics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which aims to build stronger AI research. Community across campus.
UF also offers undergraduate students an AI Fundamentals and Applications certificate in the fundamentals of AI, its application to real-world problems, and the ethical and professional responsibilities of AI.
Although the topic of AI came up at a Florida Board of Governors meeting over the summer and a proposal was made to develop a central repository of AI tools, knowledge, and best practices, the board did not establish a universal policy for SUS. Not yet.
Watson said FAMU’s new AI Council will be responsible for analyzing and identifying areas of weakness related to AI, such as fraud.
“We don’t want master’s students to write papers entirely using AI, and we don’t want journalism students to write articles that are entirely derived from the thinking of an artificial intelligence rather than their own.” ” Watson said. “This council means we are taking a step in the right direction, and we are listening to the country’s research findings, listening to the pulse of innovation and the future of higher education. .”
Additionally, the growing dominance of AI includes popular tools such as ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer). It is a chatbot released in November 2022 that responds to questions and commands from users and provides detailed human-like answers through text interactions.
In response to the release of ChatGPT, a Generative AI Task Force was established at FSU and has been meeting informally on campus to discuss AI since January 2023, Murthy said.
Related news: Productivity tool or easy path to plagiarism? FSU and FAMU professors talk about ChatGPT in education
He explained that it is difficult to draw the line when it comes to AI, but since university policy has not yet been established, the extent to which students can utilize AI is largely up to FSU faculty.
“Faculty governance has always been at the core of the university system, and faculty determine what happens in the classroom,” Murthy says. “That includes the use of artificial intelligence.”
“I’m really concerned.”
Professors like Culver have a statement on their syllabus saying they do not allow students to use AI to write assignments or quizzes. If you do so, it is plagiarism and violates the Honor Code.
“They’re not supposed to do it, so if they do, they just don’t get credit for the assignment,” Culver said. “That’s my policy.”
As college students use AI for writing-based and research-intensive subjects such as English, social studies, and humanities, Turnitin (used by over 16,000 institutions to verify authenticity and detect plagiarism) Last year, Google (a well-known tool) introduced a new AI detection tool. It is called Originality to help instructors identify AI-generated text.
According to an article by Inside Higher Ed, Turnitin claims that the tool can detect 97% of posts generated by ChatGPT.
According to an April article in Education Week, in 11% of assignments run through Turnitin’s AI detection tool, at least 20% of each assignment contained evidence of the use of AI in the text. . 3% of the assignments each consisted of more than 80% AI writing.
Because this new tool is built into the course management software Canvas, many faculty at FSU and FAMU are automatically filtering their writing assignments with the tool, allowing students to see what the AI findings reveal. You can also find out.
“They think they can get by because they are pressed for time,” said Culver, who uses AI detection tools.
FAMU English professor Zachary Showers said he has arrested at least five students who are using AI as a cheating tool.
“We will submit a report on the issues that students encounter here at FAMU, and we expect students to talk about housing issues and financial aid issues,” Showers said. “But then you’ll get a paper about things like student loan funding in Virginia. It’s completely left-field stuff.”
Showers warns students about the use of AI in the syllabus, so he gives zero points for using AI to create assignments.
“This is frustrating because it shows that the student is not really interested in the assignment,” Showers said. “They just put something together and submit it. I think every university is facing this problem right now.”
Troy Speier, also an English professor at FAMU, said about a quarter of the students in his freshman composition course used AI in their writing this semester. He described the AI-generated work as “very dry.”
“There’s no sense of humanity,” Speier said. “It feels like the computer is talking to Congress, or there’s an internal checklist making sure each item is checked off.”
Andrew Frank, the Allen Morris Professor of History at FSU, said the changes AI has created are kind of alarming, and described two examples of how AI was used in his classes last year.
“They reflected the conventional wisdom of answers available on the Internet, rather than answers related to the course material,” Frank said, referring to student reports received in the course. About the history of Seminole.
Despite being negative about the use of AI, some professors are encouraging its use to some extent. In Culver’s class, students aren’t allowed to use it for writing, but she says they can use it as a tool for finding research material.
“I just don’t want them to use it for writing,” Culver said. “Then they won’t know how to write on their own, so that’s really worrying.”
Other FSU, FAMU initiatives addressing AI
With university policies underway at both FSU and FAMU, the Center for Teaching and Learning on FAMU’s campus will provide guidance on how faculty can identify if students are using AI and how students can critically Watson said he has held at least 30 workshops over the past two years on how people can help people think.
Watson said FAMU faculty were also provided with an AI Resource Guide for Educators this fall to help them understand how to use AI, best practices and things to look out for.
Meanwhile, FSU hosts Faculty Innovator Coffee Chats, hosted by the university’s Innovation Hub, where 50 to 100 active members gather every other Wednesday to discuss how AI will reshape academia. Masu. Topics include ethics, academic integrity, medicine, K-12 education, qualitative data analysis, quantitative research, and more.
“I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities, but it’s still a new tool,” Culver said of AI. “We are still learning how to handle it and how to make it a tool that serves our purpose rather than a horrible thing that causes harm.”
Contact Tarah Jean at tjean@tallahassee.com or follow her at X: @tarahjean_.
