Hearing the term artificial intelligence draws up many different emotions: fear, anticipation, excitement. There are so many questions about AI. In an effort to better understand the impact of AI on the classroom, Puma Prints met with students and teachers in the UPrep community to hear their thoughts.
“Probably it’s gonna take away jobs, but also probably open up many new jobs,” sixth grader Ethan Drake said.
Recognizing the likely impact that AI will have on the future, some teachers feel that it’s better to teach students how to use it now so that they don’t misuse it in the future. People may think it would be better to ban AI at school so there’s no chance that someone could exploit it.
“I think your future is going to be filled with AI. I think any line of work that you end up doing is going to have AI, and I want you to be capable users of it, but I want you to be a critical user,” English department chair Carried Neibanck said.
Science teacher Matthew Staats’ opinion is that in the right hands AI can be a very helpful tool. But he also says that there is a large chance that students will use AI to plagiarise.
“I’ve had students in the past use AI to help quiz themselves, which is a good way. I’ve seen people in the past use AI to do their work without citing it, which is a bad way,” Staats said.
Niebanck thinks AI can overpower students’ views easily. If students don’t look at what AI wrote, it could write some things that the student doesn’t believe in at all.
“One of the things we’re struggling with right now as a department in the English department is thinking about how we can make sure that students are writing in their own voice with their own real critical thinking about something,” Neibanck said.
It’s hard to tell what’s AI and not in some cases. This leads teachers to be superstitious of innocent people while others get past easily. But there’s a solution. According to English teacher Brianna Corcoran, teachers use a software called Brisk. Brisk is one of many programsthat teachers use to expose student cheaters by showing teachers how many edits students make and when they made edits. Teachers can effectively see if students used AI to cheat or not.