“What are you trying to be free of? / The living? The miraculous task / of it? Love is for the ones who love the work,” wrote Joseph Fasano, in a poem entitled, “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper.”
University professors like journalism senior lecturer Gayle Golden ask a similar question: “What is the purpose of you being here at a university? What are you trying to build? And how can AI, if at all, help you do that?”
As AI begins to integrate deeper into our society, universities are now forced to contend with these questions on a massive scale.
At the University of Minnesota, guidelines surrounding AI usage have loosened. The University has partnered with Google’s Gemini as of July, as well as NotebookLM.
While the University has adopted generative AI tools for students and faculty use, instructors have struggled to delegate the role of AI in their prospective classrooms.
Senior lecturer Nat Bennett at Minnesota Carlson said the journey to incorporating AI use in classrooms adjunctively was not linear..
“It was threatening. If students can just make this stuff without us, what are we doing?” Bennett said. “The more we get to know these tools and find out how they are used, we realize this is the educational relationship we have always been in with students; it’s a learning curve, we want to push them along.”
Bennett said his approach doesn’t involve an automatic F or expulsion arrangements.
“I have better things to do than to be checking,” Bennett said about AI-written detection services. “It is about the quality of the product and why it matters rather than ‘I think you cheated’. That isn’t a very productive conversation.”
Bennett regularly practices an exercise with his students where they run an assignment prompt through AI and analyze its output.
“It seems like my students seem to think the same thing that studies show: ‘Yeah, it is really good at C minus (grade) level writing,’” Bennett said.
There are assets and liabilities to these tools.
Environmental and ethical qualms have sparked a growing culture of AI consciousness.
Internet users have coined the term “AI psychosis” to describe an unhealthy and ultimately mentally deteriorating reliance on Large Language Model chat-based AI systems like ChatGPT.
16-year-old Adam Raine was one of two young people who committed suicide earlier this year after receiving misguided guidance from ChatGPT. The chat receipts of both suicides suggest long and codependent conversational relationships with the chat service, which was never intended to replace mental health services.
Now, Raine’s parents are suing OpenAI for wrongful death.
It’s not just codependent relationships that are rapidly spurring an anti-AI movement.
Global AI usage is expected to withdraw 4.2-6.6 billion cubic meters of water by 2027, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of half of the United Kingdom, according to a Cornell University study.
Associate professor Jack Christian teaches the essential first-year writing class. He doesn’t subscribe to a uniform penalty system for AI usage, either.
Beyond ethical caveats, both Christian and Bennett recognize that a student using AI to cut corners effectively delays a student’s ability to develop their basic writing skills, but they need to understand that on their own.
“I have steered away from viewing it as academically dishonest, even though I think that it is,” Christian said. “Instead, if I am actually grading an assignment, and I am pretty sure AI has been used, I still try to grade the assignment on its merits.”
Christian said he feared English language learners who may be leaning on AI could be subject to discrimination if called out.
“We are not always providing our English language learning students enough support that would be optimal for them to succeed in an English language writing class,” Christian said.
Bennett and Christian acknowledged that AI is everywhere.
“In internships, they are being told to produce content using AI. If everyone is using it, I do not want to make my classroom kind of an artificial intelligence hermetically sealed chamber,” Bennett said. “I care about, kind of, continuing to have meaningful educational experience and practice with it.”
Golden said she prefers her students to use AI as an enhanced search engine instead of using it to do all the heavy lifting.
“In the end, it is up to the individual student to decide whether AI is deployed to make the ‘sail’ through college, or whether it’s deployed to help the student develop a critical mind,” Golden said. “If you choose that first path, you are really wasting your time and your money.”
Golden said she wanted to ask fatigued students who use AI as a crutch in their “precious years” questions we have not been asking.
“What is making you so tired? We rush around, right? Think about why you’re here at this time in your life and what you’re losing by doing what you won’t be able to, later on,” Golden said.
