Caitlin Chiller’s English classes have been discussing the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its various uses and consequences, so she convened a panel of professors to talk to Park High’s student body about the usage and potential concerns of this emerging field. The panel, hosted by work based learning coordinator Jeanine Ensign, was made up of three individuals: Anne Gibson, instructor in the Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship at MSU, Nicholas Lux, associate professor of curriculum and instruction at MSU, and John Sheppard, professor of Artificial Intelligence and Interim Director of the Center for Science, Technology, Ethics and Society at MSU.
With the first question asked about artificial intelligence, Sheppard made it very clear that A.I. is not machine learning. Sheppard expressed this to such an extent that he states that there is absolutely no machine learning whatsoever. All of the popular A.I.s that you see such as Chat GPT is Generative A.I.. This means that it does not make its own information through learning, but takes from millions of other sources and restates what other sites say according to whatever your prompt is. Furthermore because it’s generative you’ll never get the same answer twice. This isn’t machine learning, this is, to a point, plagiarism, Lux said.
But not everything on the internet is true. With the absolute surge in a society that is spending half, if not more, of their time online, misinformation is spread like wildfire in a dry field. You should focus on the actual information you’re getting. With it being generative that doesn’t mean it’s true. You need to sort through all of the false information that is being shot your way.
“This tool hallucinates, it spits nonsense from time to time,” said Sheppard on the topic of misinformation.
Gibson’s goal with A.I. is to help her students speak and write more fluently. With AI specifically she has made it a point to have her students cite the sources that the A.I. is pulling from.
“AI hasn’t changed education a lot-yet” says Gibson.
“The best professional development is one on one,” says Lux. What he is mostly concerned with is how it has grown at an explosive rate, and how are they going to control it. As a father of high schoolers himself, he said it is very interesting to talk to his children about using A.I. in their everyday lives.
There is a major concern regarding the idea of publishing. It’s about ethics and responsibility, or taking responsibility. When writing a professional paper, you can use generative AI, However, you need to cite all of the sources that it pulled from. Another big concern is students using AI and not dealing with copyrights when writing a story.
Panelists emphasized that with a student’s responsibility it is important to remember that people don’t act the same online as they do offline. Oftentimes people feel more encouraged to be aggressive and verbally violent because they don’t suffer any repercussions. This creates a problem if this is what is being pulled from, and it’s part of that false, or misinformation.
When it comes to terms of regulation it gets quite a bit more tricky. Digital citizenship and being a good citizen are hard to regulate in AI like this. However, “we haven’t seen a game changer yet, It ain’t all that,” Sheppard said when asked if AI needs regulation. With some recent problems of lawyers using AI to write their cases it’s been asked if these AI technologies can cause a massive problem. The answer in terms of education is no. The person-to-person is too strong and too humanistic and the human goes deeper than just face value.

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