By Arabella Ceralde
Every day, students and faculty use artificial intelligence, or AI. Intentionally or not, AI continues to become more prevalent as days pass. Companies like Microsoft and Google push the convenience of AI on students and everyday people.
“I’m irritated that the way AI is being pushed to me in literally every aspect of my life.” Said Jason Naylor, a professor at the University of Louisville.
In an interview with Professor Naylor, he discussed the great uses of AI in meteorology. AI can be an essential tool for analyzing large datasets and pattern recognition.
It’s no shocker that AI can be an incredibly useful tool. However, ethics becomes a great responsibility when prompting AI, not only because AI must learn to advance, but so do students. With abundant exposure to AI platforms and assistants, an overreliance on this technology is harder to avoid.
The way that AI even generates these designs is by learning from the data it has been given. Effort and skill were put into the human artwork that is being bottle-fed to generative AI programs, which were born to innovate the concept of labor and efficiency. AI, like a child, is “monkey see monkey do.” When AI generates responses, images, or other media, it’s spitting out plagiarized content.
“It’s ingesting all this basically copyrighted material that nobody gave it permission to use, and it’s being used to put those creatives out of business,” said Professor Naylor.
It seems like every minute, another ad promotes AI in creative design and visuals, as well as basic skills like note-taking. One program, Base 44, is used to build apps with simple prompts and no coding necessary. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of learning basic coding?
Incorporating AI into higher education requires a balance. Mechanical engineering student Memory Crawford says she balances her use to make AI a tool, instead of a threat to her learning.
For a project, an instructor prompted Crawford to write code using AI shortly after teaching the class to code. She was confused about the purpose of turning to AI; writing it manually would have put those recently taught skills into practice.
“But then it’s inhibited by the use of AI because you’re not actually practicing it,” said Crawford. “And that’s a professor recommending that,”
Every time AI improves and efficiently accomplishes a simple task, we risk building a reliance on AI to do the work for us. Soon, the simple tasks will slowly get more complex and people will start losing jobs. Not only does AI threaten critical thinking and job opportunities for UofL students, but it also threatens basic human learning.
