Artificial intelligence has its opponents on campus. Plenty of professors regard it as just a way for students to cheat. That certainly is a problem.
Maybe AI also has legitimate academic uses, however. In today’s Martin Center article, Shannon Watkins interviews two UNC officials (Dayna Durbin and Daniel Anderson) who have been working on ways to separate the good from the bad.
Here are some snippets:
Dayna Durbin: One of the things that we were hearing from students was that they were intrigued by generative AI tools. But they weren’t quite sure if they were staying within the bounds of the academic honor code and if they would, perhaps, be accused of cheating or plagiarism if they used some of these tools. We wanted to boost their confidence in using AI tools and [for them to] feel like they had the skills to make those calls. . . .
Daniel Anderson: One of the things that we did in the first-year writing course that I taught—the course focuses a lot of times on different genres, and one genre is a literature review, where you take a research topic and review it and summarize different perspectives, different bits and pieces of information. So we were experimenting with ChatGPT and came up with a sample topic: noise pollution from server farms. If you’re in a rural community and there’s a server farm, it turns out it creates a whole bunch of noise pollution. And this is what Dayna and my other librarian colleagues might call a nice narrow topic. It’s not just something like “happiness,” it’s a very focused topic. . . .
Dayna Durbin: I try to stress [to] students that a lot of the same skills that you would use in the research and the writing process don’t go away in terms of critical thinking and doing that hard intellectual work. Generative AI is a tool that can help you along that path, but it shouldn’t be replacing any of those steps. In a similar way, when the internet became widely available as a tool, it changed the way that we research and write, but we’re still doing that same intellectual work. I think we’ll see, as these tools get more widespread and more used, a similar process. . . .