By Carroll’s recent discussion panel on Feb 4, about AI in Society, which was composed of Carroll College staff and students, addressed questions and concerns over the use of AI in academic settings as well as its impact on wider society.
The panel was held in the Simperman Lecture Hall and drew in a large crowd, with a mixture of students and members of the public in attendance.
The event began with a brief presentation on the history of AI by Julia Harris, a part-time instructor from Carroll theatre whose most recent work was directing ‘Anthropology,’ a play focused on the relationship between AI and humans.
Questions from the moderator, Dr. Alan Hansen, who is a communication studies professor, were then posed to the panel, with questions written by the audience included in the discussion afterwards.
With this panel being hosted on our college campus, many prompts and questions from the audience naturally focused on the use of AI in schools and higher education, such as: What does the increase of AI in our daily lives mean for teachers and students?
Although no one can definitively answer this question, panel members commented on the impact it has already had in educational settings.
Rachel Martin, academic instructional technologist, one of the panelists, noted that even in a class with highly motivated students who are keen to learn, many still rely on generative AI to help with class work.
“There’s a lot of value that comes from the process of doing hard things,” said Dr. Shaye Bodine, an assistant professor of engineering.
Despite how convenient AI can be in helping with homework or paper planning, using problem-solving and critical thinking skills are crucial parts of education that should not be lost.
“I really worry about it framing our arguments,” said Martin, “I worry about that being replaced so easily.”
Martin emphasized the importance of working through blank page syndrome when writing a paper, and how challenging moments such as this in education can hugely benefit the student.
The aspect of AI in educational settings that concerns people the most is its inconsistency in the information it outputs. Despite their unreliability being widely known, many students still use AI chatbots to find information to use for schoolwork.
Furthering this use of AI to find information is the change in search engines, such as Google, with AI now being ingrained in their search results, often coming up at the top of the results page.
The inconsistency of AI’s answers causes a wide distrust in generative AI.
However, as mentioned by some panelists, AI has been put to the test in recent medical studies in which it has successfully detected inconsistencies in medical tests with more accuracy than human medical professionals.
Although being able to find medical issues earlier and therefore having a higher chance of successfully treating them is a positive achievement, the panelists pointed out that we do not know how the AI arrived at these results.
With AI, we know the input and we know the output, yet we do not know how AI thinks.
“I think we are on that track,” said Bodine about having to accept AI’s answers without knowing how it arrived at certain conclusions.
“What it’s doing to society as far as our trust is concerning,” said Dr. Joe Helbling, an associate professor of education. “How can we trust AI, especially when it has the ability to generate false images and audio with such ease?”
Distrust caused by AI extends to our distrust in other people, too, with the risk of it being used irresponsibly to infiltrate spheres such as politics.
The risk of reputational damage for individuals, as a result of AI-generated false images or audio, has also increased. AI could easily be used for various illicit activities.
AI being able to do some human jobs to a large degree of success brings up the questions of how human AI is becoming, and what does it mean to be human?
“It lacked the soul,” stated Helbling when he asked an AI chatbot to make a piece of music.
Although it is progressing at a rapid rate and constantly improving itself and fixing its own mistakes, AI chatbots completely lack any core aspects of humanity, such as experiencing emotions.
These concerns over how AI is impacting our daily lives and how quickly it is progressing are not solely being asked in educational settings, but globally and in all areas of life.
All panelists agreed that continuing these conversations about AI is the most important thing we can do.
By continuously challenging and monitoring how AI is used, we can ensure that it does not go completely beyond our control and cause irreversible damage to individual people and wider society.
