AI has become a topic of debate on college campuses, with professors encouraging and designing projects around the use of AI and banning it from their classes. Some classes, such as COM 3340: Politics and Mass Media, have implemented projects that utilize ChatGPT to write analyses based on students’ notes, while other classes ask students to refrain from using AI.
Political science professor Tom Carr is urging his students to refrain from using AI in their papers.
“Having a knowledge base of your own reading and writing will allow you to use AI tools more effectively in the future,” Carr says. “I think when you use AI, you’re outsourcing the creative process, so you need to be able to think for yourself. You have to do your own quality checking, but having the skills to do that yourself will allow you to use AI more effectively in the future.”
Regardless of his policy, Carr said it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish papers written by AI from those written by students.
“Just in the last year and a half, we’ve seen an improvement in the quality of what is clearly AI,” Carr said. “It’s still recognizable, but it’s not as obvious as it was before. So I think we’ll get to a point where AI is undetectable, probably within a year, maybe two years at most, and that would be unfortunate.”
Journalism professor Israel Balderas decided to take a different approach by incorporating AI into his classes and curriculum.
“I started talking about AI in the context of ethics,” Balderas says. “I recognized that this tool would make it easier for students to do their homework, like Grammarly or a calculator, but I thought this was different in that it would evolve over time, and what I was teaching in the winter of the year would change in the spring and definitely change in the fall. So as a teacher, AI was forcing me to evolve my curriculum.”
He also said that AI will change the face of journalism and students will need to adapt.
“For me, what I’ve been rethinking is how do we move away from this idea that journalism equals content, and journalists are content creators, and towards this idea that journalism is a service,” Balderas said. “I think journalism is human interaction; that is, human interaction is what journalism is.”
Emma Bucci, a sophomore finance major, said the professors have a fairly new and broad approach.
“Most of my professors have actually mentioned it, and two of them have said they’re OK with using it as a starting point. They’ve said, ‘Don’t write your paper with AI, but if you’re researching a question, AI is a useful resource,’ so they’re not actually surprised if we use AI for some of their research,” Bucci said.
But she said she has mixed feelings about AI.
“I know this is a very hot-button topic, but I think we should be careful about the extent to which we use AI to support learning,” Bucci says. “Yes, AI can solve problems, but can it actually do that? That’s what we really need to know.”
Amy Sanne, a second-year strategic communications student, has also noticed an increase in the use of AI in her classes.
“Most classes will either bring it up and say they’ll probably use it in class, or they’ll bring it up and say they’ll never use it in class,” Sanne said. “Some classes will use it to their advantage and use it for research or whatever.”
Elisa Edwards, a sophomore in international and global studies, said she feels very uneasy about using AI.
“Personally, I find it really hard to use AI in the classroom. Sometimes I feel like I’m using it wrong, so it kind of puts me off it because I feel like I’m cheating anyway,” Edwards said.
