Faculty Members Weigh How To Enter the Brave New World of AI

“It can create any sort of text from your prompts – outlines, essays, poetry, song lyrics, computer codes … you name it, it can do anything you ask it to do,” said Andrew Pennock, an associate professor of public policy at UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. “It does it lightning fast. And it does it in a very conversational way. Once you start a conversation, it remembers the context in which that conversation started. I can tell it to introduce errors, I can tell it to write as a fifth-grader, I can tell it to write as a graduate student.”

Before classes started this semester, Palmer and Pennock held an online workshop with faculty members on the artificial intelligence application and its implications.

“There are faculty who are completely unaware of the tools,” Pennock said. “There are faculty who know about the tools and are scared and thinking, ‘What’s the point of my class or will my assignments make sense in a ChatGPT world?’ And then there are faculty that are both curious and excited about the possibilities.”

Pennock suggested the best approach would be to learn to work with the AI applications.

“It’s a losing battle to be adversarial with students about generative AI,” Pennock said. “There are opportunities here to teach students how to think about the benefits of AI and the limits of it.”

How ChatGPT and other AI programs will be viewed at a University with a heralded honor code remains to be seen. The student-led Honor Committee began tackling that question this semester, but has not made any formal recommendations.

Some professors have already started working with the students on how to approach the artificial intelligence program. David Mick, the Robert Hill Carter Professor of Marketing at UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce, studied the application and added a paragraph to his syllabus that cautioned the students from claiming the AI’s work as their own.

“I prohibit the use of these AI tools to produce content that they can then put into an exercise or a term paper, which they have to produce in my class, and then hand it in as though it was their work,” he said during the workshop. “I stressed the words ‘content’ and ‘text.’ You cannot generate content and text, and then use it as if it were yours.

“However,” he said, “if you can use these tools to find sources of insights, which you can then use – tables, figures, opinions or whatever – that you would quote, you can do that and then put the reference the way you would do any other time you write a paper, so that we know the source of where that idea came from.”

Sarah Ware, co-director of Legal Research and Writing at the School of Law, thinks the application could be used in drafting legal documents.

“There is a lot of legal writing on the internet that AI could pull from,” Ware said. “If it becomes a reliable tool for drafting, it could change how lawyers work. And that could change how we teach – thinking about how to use it skillfully, how to use it ethically. But it’s not there yet. I’ve played with it a bit. The results looked good, but were shallow and sometimes wildly wrong.”

Pennock said there are beneficial uses for the AI applications, such as creating PowerPoint presentations and simplifying complex technical text and distilling it down to more easily understood prose.

One of the AI-generated images for this story through NightCafé turned out strange and creepy, showing the value of a human artist for illustrations.

“How many of our students find the readings, the journal articles, we give them confusing?” said Pennock, who noted that an application named “Explainpaper” allows a user to “upload a paper, highlight the text that you find confusing, and it will give you a plain English version.”

Pennock highlighted a page of journal text, 537 words, and the AI program reduced it to 170 words.

“Students can read much more quickly as they read this,” Pennock said of the shorter version. “And you can imagine if students work together, they could create very short versions that are maybe dumbed down, but very quick reads of the journal articles that we’re asking them to engage in. It's missing all the nuance that I find helpful and engaging and wonderful about this article. But to a student who’s entering the conversation without a lot of scaffolding, this might allow them to get there without the nuance.”

“[ChatGPT] can draft emails for you, it can draft the meeting minutes,” Palmer said. “However, the application doesn’t know anything about you. So anytime you ask students to reflect on their own experience, it’s not going to be able to do that. So far, ChatGPT knows nothing, or very little after 2021. That will change. At some point, it will be almost instantaneously updated.”

Mick questions the ethics of working with artificial intelligence applications since they learn through interaction.

Historian Jennifer Sessions agrees.

“I feel very torn because we have a responsibility to learn about what this thing is and how it works because some of our students will be experimenting with it,” Sessions said during the workshop. “And I am I resentful that there’s no way to do that without contributing to it.”

Sessions said she was also concerned about data privacy and the opacity of the entities and business models behind these tools.

“What do the creators and operators of these tools intend to do with the user data they collect?” she said.

Another discussion revolves around how and what students learn and what expectations future employers may have about student’s understanding and use of artificial intelligence.

“The employer is going to expect that they know how to use AI tools effectively to do their job better, quicker, faster,” Palmer said. “Some jobs are probably going to become obsolete or change significantly.”

“A dimension we need to add is the ethics of using these tools,” Pennock said. “One aspect is the traditional norms of authorship and academic integrity. Another is thinking about how these programs scrape the internet for data without consent or attention to copyright infringement or harmful content.

“Generative AI is not something that we can just wish away. We will have to learn to work with it and live with it. And I think it can have beneficial implications for how we teach and how students learn. This will play out over time as the technology matures and we grapple with it in our courses,” Pennock said.

“For now, there’s value in engaging students in conversations about the ethics an generative AI program producing content without a transparent process of knowing where the underlying data came from and how it was assembled into the text it produces.”