With the rise of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has become one of the most talked about topics in education, with space being cited as both a concern and a symbol of the future.
At the 56th annual Carroll F. Johnson Scholastic Achievement Dinner, hosted by the Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents to honor valedictorians and salutatorians, the region’s top students were hopeful about a future in which AI plays a greater role, but were aware that technology needs to be improved.
“We shouldn’t be afraid of these things. We shouldn’t be mad at them. We should figure out ways to use them to…not avoid work, but to improve our work,” said Yorktown valedictorian Julia Whalen High. School.
AI in education
Students at Wednesday’s dinner said current applications of AI are of limited help, but they see a future where a more powerful model could have both positive and negative effects.
“It’s going to change the way we look at education,” said Whalen, who plans to study history at Bowdoin College.
While AI can be used to avoid work, the more “inspirational examples” Whalen had seen were “people using it to improve their work,” by generating prompts or using it to put the finishing touches on an essay , they said. .
Hastings High School salutatorian Erik Ghalib, who plans to attend Middlebury College and major in political science, said AI is now more useful for menial tasks such as reformatting documents. Ghalib said he found Microsoft Copilot more useful than ChatGPT because it cites sources.
“But if you ask it to write something or collect information, I find that in its current state it is really flawed,” Ghalib said.
Hastings High School valedictorian Sonya Lasser, who plans to attend Duke University and major in mechanical engineering, said she tried to use ChatGPT to study for a physics test this year, with poor results. Lasser only asked multiple choice questions to give her an answer that was not an option. Otherwise it would provide wrong information, she said.
Sophia Lam, salutatorian at Yorktown High School, who plans to attend Cornell to study chemistry or physics, said a request for a supplemental essay for college asked for a reflection on a response from AI.
“I feel like writing a reflection on what AI has chosen to write is such an interesting way to look at it,” Lam said. “And then it’s also interesting to see what AI says versus what you would say.”
ChatGPT “can be seen as a tool for writing things down,” Lam said, but she thinks it can be a useful tool for writing down ideas. “But maybe we shouldn’t become too dependent on it.”
AI and art
Ghalib believes AI will improve, but right now “some of the things we see from it are scary in terms of what it can do to art.” AI can sing and even imitate performers, Ghalib said. Problems arise when AI-generated music goes viral and makes money instead of being created by a real person who could make money from it, Ghalib said.
Whalen noted that authors are using AI to create art for book covers.
Yet Whalen is less concerned about AI as a threat to artists. Man-made art and writings remain more attractive because they “have a real soul behind them,” they said.
Social consequences
Soon-to-be graduates described the potential applications of AI and its potential broader societal impact.
“I think what it will probably end up doing as it improves is widen the gap between the skilled and the unskilled,” Ghalib said, meaning that more educated people will be able to recognize when AI is wrong. “If you haven’t learned to identify those things, you’re going to take the hallucinations of them as fact.”
“I think it’s just going to perpetuate the number of people who won’t know how to write, the number of people who won’t know how to learn,” Ghalib said. “Because it’s going to do so much for us.”
He doesn’t necessarily think AI will take over the jobs of experts, but “I think it will probably be a barrier to the number of people reaching the expert level.”
Lakeland valedictorian Kris Dominic said a good use of AI would be simpler tasks, generating ideas or finding inspiration.
“The human mind will have a greater reach compared to AI, no matter how well AI is developed,” says Dominic, who plans to attend the New York Institute of Technology for his pre-med track.
AI in STEM careers
Valhalla High School valedictorian Maya Richards, who plans to study biochemistry at Cornell this fall, learned about AI during a business Olympics class — that it could be useful in research and business, especially in determining how feasible an idea is, or how well an idea will work and what impact it can have.
Richards plans to pursue a career in pathology, the branch of medicine that diagnoses diseases, and she could see AI helping with that.
Richards also recognizes the disadvantages. “Putting your ideas into AI can limit communication with other people.” There has to be a balance, she said.
Regulate AI: How schools try to find the balance between ChatGPT and keeping students’ information safe
Whalen said they might see AI more in the context of STEM and less in a creative capacity. But Whalen would also like to use it for other tasks, such as summarizing a long document instead of having to read the entire document.
Johan Easaw, valedictorian of Walter Panas High School in the Lakeland School District who plans to major in computer engineering at Purdue University, thinks AI regulations are an “unnecessary barrier to technological progress.”
Easaw believes that ethical issues can be addressed in the development of AI, and he aims to develop models that have human-like values. This would allow AI to make better decisions and “prevent its use for harm,” Easaw said.
Last summer, Walter Panas High School salutatorian Patille Guekjian said during a class at Manhattan College that they discussed the possible use of AI learning through images to identify defective parts, such as in an airplane engine. But right now, “artificial intelligence is so new,” Guekjian said, so “I think that shouldn’t be the only reason to say that a part is not flawed.”
But in the future, when AI is more developed, it may be possible to rely on AI for something like this, Guekjian said.
Guekjian, who plans to study aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said the use of AI should be slowly integrated and supported by a human.
Still, I’m more on the optimistic side, Guekjian said.
Scholarship winners
Sixteen graduates were awarded scholarships of at least $1,000 by the Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents during Wednesday’s dinner. Students can renew the scholarships every year if they are in good standing with their universities.
These are the winners of the scholarship:
Business fair
Abass Na-Aata, Poughkeepsie High School
Kailee Mastropietro, Mahopac High School
Rylee McGinnis, Rockland BOCES Center for Career and Technical Education
Katie Molina-Salazar, Yonkers High School
Damaris Ferrer, Mount Vernon STEAM Academy
Engineering/Architecture/Mathematics/Science Scholarship
Claire Lewis, Arlington High School
Jonathan Bai, Croton-Harmon High School
Dahlia Kordit, Nanuet Senior High School
Penelope Cloonan, Yonkers High School
Technology fair
Glenn Moeller, Brewster High School
Judith Johnson Opportunity Scholarship
Emmanuelle Nickerson, FDR High School
Maylin Vasquez, Peekskill High School
Christian Laquidara, Clarkstown North High School
Haider Choudhry, Yonkers High School
Stephen A. Perelson Memorial Scholarship
Britaney Sinclair, Mount Vernon High School
Bruce Bothwell Memorial Scholarship
Ava D-Arcy, White Plains High School
Contact Diana Dombrowski at ddombrowski@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @domdomdiana.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Lower Hudson NY valedictorians, salutatorians talk AI in arts and STEM
