Over the past year, the use of AI has drastically changed classroom landscapes at Pitt.
As the new academic semester begins, students and professors at Pitt are facing the popularity of AI in academics. ChatGPT is altering the academic world, crafting papers that could take days to write for students in minutes, while leaving professors challenged to navigate this new reality.
Students and professors feel AI use is not just an issue of cheating but is becoming a concern for the loss of foundational academic skills.
According to William Stapleford, a first-year philosophy major, AI can assist students in elevating academic skills, but if used incorrectly it can eliminate those skills.
“I know people use [AI] to consolidate sources, and I think that can be really helpful,” Stapleford said. “But when you start using it for creative input or to just do your work for you, that is when it gets bad.”
Stapleford believes it is a deeper issue about AI replacing humans in the real world.
“I’d like to think that it’s impossible to fully replace a human, but I think it could, if we start relying on it,” said Stapleford.
Carnegie Mellon University, the “birthplace of AI,” recently held a conference focusing on the future of AI. Pittsburgh recently hosted the AI Horizons Summit at Bakery Square, which addressed AI and its development in Pennsylvania.
The use of AI in the classroom is also raising concerns for educators. Grant Martsolf, a professor in the nursing school, wrote a blog article about AI use, arguing that the incorporation of AI in academics is irreversible.
“My big issue is for a long-term cultural concern,” Martsolf said. “We have this human soul, this human body, and it allows us to do amazing human things. Our capacity to love, our capacity to have language, that is an enormous accomplishment.”
Martsolf believes that access to AI in early education poses a threat to a student’s ambition to learn later on in life.
“If we have students who use ChatGPT to puke out all their assignments starting at eight years old, by the time they get to college, do we expect them to be able to write?” said Martsolf. “This goes beyond, ‘Let’s fix a cheating problem,’ which it is. It is a cheating problem, but it is [also] a much deeper cultural reckoning with what we are doing to ourselves and whether or not we care.”
Although Martsolf believes that students are aware of the negative outcomes of AI, he does not think it will be eliminated in the classroom.
“In a world that’s committed to efficiency and money, I don’t see a future in which ChatGPT is gone. I don’t see a future in which we have a cultural reversion where we are committed to the arts and things that ChatGPT would make no sense in,” said Martsolf.
Pitt recently put in place new AI tools, including PittGPT — a generative AI platform that allows faculty and administrators to have their information protected — and released new protocols for what is considered a reasonable use for AI among students and faculty members.
Austin Wise, a senior political science major, is particularly concerned about AI’s potential to replace parts of the labor force.
“I am just very scared of the effects that [AI] will have on our labor markets — not only here in the United States, but internationally,” Wise said.
Wise said his peers feel negatively about AI, but he believes AI will never surpass organic human creativity.
“There will always be an equal balance because no matter how advanced AI gets I don’t think that it will supersede the creativity of humans, no matter what,” Wise said.