On Thursday afternoon, the Saint Mary’s digital and public humanities program hosted their second roundtable conversation on artificial intelligence. The session began with a brief presentation by Marwan Gebran, an associate physics and astronomy professor.
Gebran began his presentation by defining what chatbots are, and the difference among them.
“The main definition of a chatbot, is just a program that simulates a kind of conversation with a human," he said.
Gebran highlighted that the strength of the generative chatbot is the versatility that it can perform anything we want.
“You can ask ChatGPT to create a course from scratch, related to a specific field. It will do this but of course not everything will be correct because it was trained on the web,” he said. “The web contains a lot of wrong information, but it can give you a skeleton of whatever course you need.”
Gebran argued that chatbots shouldn't be restricted completely.
“We shouldn’t try to limit the use of chatbots, instead we should try to find a way to live with these chatbots, since they will be the future,” he said.
Gebran argued that the existence of chatbots is not as new as we think.
“We can even consider Google as a chatbot. Any device that requires any interaction is a chatbot," he said.
Next up to the podium was Marie Claire Ferretti, a senior international development, intercultural studies and global studies major. Claire began her presentation by outlining the impacts of AI, and in particular how ChatGPT impacts the education system at a K-12 level.
Ferretti began by addressing, noting that there is no recent information since then that is completely accurate. On the other hand, she said, an advantage of AI is that it cuts down on time taken to perform many tasks.
“The repercussions of their program is that a lot of people saw the benefits of it and utilized it. And it was kinda an overnight success,” she said. “It started being used in schools, businesses and in the medical world.”
A lot of Ferretti’s research pertained to the American education system’s actions towards AI, since no one knew what actions to take for students K-12.
“In early January of 2023, the New York City’s education department placed a ban over all NYC public schools, restricting ChatGPT on school owned devices,” she said. “In school they saw it as a threat. There wasn’t a lot of information on it, so there was the idea that it would cause a lot of negative impacts on students.”
Ferretti proceeded to give her biggest takeaways that she has found through her research thus far. “A lot of teachers are behind the eight-ball with AI technology, there are a lot of unknowns” she continued, “Since it happened so fast, students figured it out way quicker than the teachers did, and used it to their advantage.”
Later in the afternoon, Christopher Wedrychowicz, associate professor of math and computer science, moderated a roundtable discussion.
“I am highly pessimistic, I don’t really see this trend sort of going in a positive direction,” he said.
Wedrychowicz then proceeded to ask the presenters questions about their findings, ranging from the creativity that is increasingly being threatened by AI, to what kind of limitations we should put on AI.
"I'm not as pessimistic,” Gebran answered, “I don't think there should be rules on how to block this, other than ways on how to live with it.”
Wedrychowicz then asked about the likelihood of jobs being taken away by the spread of AI. Gebran responded, “We used to use horses, now we use cars, but we didn’t kill all the horses, they're still here. The idea is that we will adapt, and I think it will never stop, because the curiosity about AI will never stop.”
Gebran concluded with some closing remarks and room for thought. “I don't see any problem with what's happening, I only see that we have to think about how to adapt our behavior and education mainly, and how to understand the students' needs with all these tools,” he said.
“What do we do if we find students using Chat GPT?” Gebran asked, “These are the things we should be thinking about, other than what's the endpoint with this technology because there is no endpoint it will continue on.”
