University of Utah student Rebeca Damico said her professors initially took a hard line on AI when ChatGPT was introduced in 2022, but she and other students say schools have softened their stance now that the usefulness — and career potential — of the technology is clearer become. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for States Newsroom)
For 21-year-old Rebeca Damico, the public release of ChatGPT in 2022 during her sophomore year at the University of Utah felt like navigating a minefield.
The PR student, who is now set to graduate in the spring, said her professors immediately added policies to their syllabi banning use of the chatbot and calling the generative artificial intelligence tool a form of plagiarism.
“For me, as someone who follows the rules, I was very scared,” Damico said. “I thought, Oh, I can’t even think about using it because they’ll know.”
Salt Lake City native Damico studied journalism before switching her major to public relations, and saw ChatGPT and similar tools as a real threat to the writing industry. She was also very aware of the ‘temptation’ she and her classmates now had: suddenly a thesis, which you might spend all night writing about, could be done in a few minutes with the help of AI.
“I know people who have started using it and would use it to… write their entire essays. I know people who got caught. I know people who didn’t,” Damico said. “Especially in these last few weeks of the semester, it’s so easy to say, ‘Oh, just put it in ChatGPT,’ but then we’re like, if we do it once, it’s kind of a slippery slope.”
But students say they’re getting mixed messages: professors’ stern warning against using AI and growing pressure from the job market to master it.
The technological developments of generative AI in recent years have opened up a new industry and a wealth of employment opportunities. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom recently announced the first statewide partnership with a technology company to bring AI curriculum, resources and capabilities to the state’s public colleges.
And even students who aren’t in IT roles will likely be asked to use AI in their industry in some way. Recent research from the World Economic Forum’s Work Trend Index Annual Report 2024 shows that 75% of the workforce is using AI at work, and some hiring managers are prioritizing AI skills as much as real-world experience.
Higher vision of AI
In recent years, the University of Utah, like most academic institutions, has had to take a stand on AI. As Damico has experienced, the university has added AI guidelines to its student handbook, which take a fairly tough stance on the tools.
It urges professors to add additional AI detection tools beyond education platform Canvas’s Turnitin feature, which scans assignments for plagiarism. The guidelines now also define the use of AI tools without citation, documentation or authorization as forms of cheating.
While Damico said some professors still take a hard line against AI, some have begun to embrace it. The case-by-case basis Damico describes of her professors is consistent with how many academic institutions are handling the technology.
Some universities set university-wide rules, while others leave it up to the professors themselves to set AI standards in their classrooms. Others, like Stanford University’s policy, recognize that students are likely to encounter it.
Stanford bans the use of AI to “substantially complete an assignment or exam” and says students must disclose its use, but says that “without a clear statement from a course instructor, the use or consultation with generative AI in the same way will be treated as assistance from another person.”
Virginia Byrne is an associate professor of higher education and student affairs at Morgan State University in Baltimore, and she studies technology in the lives of students and teachers, with a focus on the impact it has on students. She said the university is giving professors the opportunity to figure out what works best for them when it comes to AI. She often assigns projects that encourage students to explore the strengths and weaknesses of popular AI tools.
She is also a researcher at the TRAILS Institute, a multi-institutional organization that aims to understand what trust in AI looks like and how to create ethical, sustainable AI solutions. Together with Morgan State, researchers from the University of Maryland, George Washington University and Cornell University are conducting a variety of studies, such as how ChatGPT can be used in healthcare decision making, how to create watermarking technology for AI or how other countries shaping AI policy. .
“It’s cool to be in a space where people are doing research that’s related, but so different,” says Byrne. “Because it expands your thinking, and it allows us to bring graduate students and undergraduates into this community where everyone is focused on reliability and AI, but from so many different lenses.”
Byrne hopes her students see the potential AI has to make their lives and work easier, but she worries it creates an “artificial expectation” about how young people should perform online.
“It can lead to some people, younger people, who are just starting their careers, feeling like they have to use Canva (social media tool) to look perfect on LinkedIn, and use all these tools to… save their time and optimize their schedules,” said Byrne. “And I just worry that it creates a false expectation of speed and efficiency that the tools currently cannot achieve.”
Theresa Fesinstine is the founder of peoplepower.ai, which trains HR professionals on how AI can be used efficiently within their organizations. This semester, she taught her first college course at the City University of New York on AI and business, teaching students of all years and backgrounds.
Fesinstine said she was surprised by how many of her students knew little to nothing about AI, but heard many other teachers warning that they would fail students who used it on assignments. She thinks these mixed messages often stem from not understanding the technology and its capabilities to help with a draft, or to find research resources.
“It’s a little scary, and I think that’s where most of the fear is right now,” she said. “It’s that most people, in my opinion, are not trained or understand how to use AI most effectively, which means they use it the same way you would use Google.”
Real world applications
Shriya Boppana, a 25-year-old MBA student at Duke University, not only uses AI in her daily life for schoolwork, but is also pursuing a career in generative AI development and acquisition. She wasn’t initially interested in AI, she said, but she worked on a project with Google and realized how the technology would impact everyday life, and how malleable it still is.
“Once you realize how much the technology is actually not as developed as you think it is, I was a little more interested in… trying to understand what the path is to get it where it needs to go,” Boppana said.
She said she uses some form of AI tool every day, from planning her own schedule to letting a chatbot decide how students in a group project should divide and complete work based on their availability. Because she works with it regularly, she understands the strengths and weaknesses of AI. She says it helps her get everyday tasks done, process data or outline an assignment.
But she said the personal tone she wants in her writing isn’t there yet with publicly available AI tools, so she doesn’t rely entirely on them for papers or correspondence.
Parris Haynes, a 22-year-old junior studying philosophy at Morgan State, says the structure and high demand for some students’ courses almost “encourages or incentivizes” them to use AI to get it all done.
He sees himself either going into law or academia, and says he’s a little nervous about how AI is changing these industries. While he relies on AI to help organize thoughts or assignments for classes like chemistry, Haynes said he wouldn’t come close to that when it comes to his work or career-related goals for his philosophy classes.
“I don’t really see much room for AI to relieve me of the burden of academic assignments or potential career tasks in philosophy,” Haynes said. “Even if I could write a convincing, human-looking article, a philosophical article, it robs me of the joy of doing it.”
Gen Z’s view of their future with AI
Like Haynes, Fesinstine knows that some of her students are interested but a little afraid of the power AI could have over their future. While there has been a lot of research on the impact of AI on the jobs of older generations, those about to break into the workforce may be hardest hit because they grew up with these technologies.
“I would say the attitude is – I use this term a lot, ‘cautiously curious,’” Fesinstine said. “You know, there’s definitely an atmosphere around ethics and protection that I don’t know that I would see in other generations, maybe… But there’s also a recognition that this is something that a lot of companies are going to need and are going to do. want to use.”
Now, two years after the release of ChatGPT, Damico is starting to realize the ways in which generative AI can be useful in the workplace. She started working at PR agency Kronus Communications earlier this year and was encouraged to explore some of the time-saving or brainstorming features of generative AI.
She’s become a fan of ChatGPT explaining her new business concepts or suggesting Instagram captions. She also likes to use it for more refined answers than Google could provide, such as when she’s looking for publications to pitch a client to.
While she’s still cautious and won’t use generative AI to write actual assignments for her, Damico says she realizes she’ll need the knowledge and experience after graduation — “it kind of gives you an edge.”
Boppana, who sees her career growing in the AI space, is incredibly optimistic about the role AI will play in her future. She knows she is more knowledgeable and prepared to enter an AI-centric workforce than most, but she feels the opportunities for growth in healthcare, telecommunications, computing and more are worth it in uncertain to wade waters.
“I think it’s a wonderful opportunity for people to learn how machines interact with the human world, and how we can, I don’t know, make prosthetic limbs, test artificial hearts… find hearing aids,” said. “There is so much beauty in the way AI helps people. I think you just have to find your space in it.”
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