Across our campus, we are seeing professors adapting in real time to the increasing use of generative AI and how this technology integrates into our daily academic lives. As an English major here at St. Olaf, my first class in the fall of 2023 had no AI statement. Now, as I enter my last year, every syllabus has an AI policy. Particularly in the humanities, it seems that AI is expanding faster than we can figure out how to handle it in an academic context. Some of my friends in STEM courses have found that they are able to use AI in certain instances, but that professors ask them to be specific about their inputs and cite all uses of AI. My English and other humanities courses are definitely more anti-AI, since an AI software has no idea how to interpret a text as well as I or my classmates might; it can only present a generalized and broad stance.
The future for AI in education is very hazy at the moment. When AI is becoming a part of every Google search, how do we learn like we used to? Will we get to a point where we have to redefine what learning is? Is it the investigative search and processing we see it as now, or has it become something new? I think that at St. Olaf and in higher education in general, it is important to exercise and analyze the use of the human brain as much as possible.
However, there are some benefits to AI, such as its ability to look at a piece of writing and offer suggestions for improvement based on a provided rubric. That said, this is also something that we technically could do on our own, for our peers, or use writing tutoring services for — but the AI can do it in seconds, so how do we compete with that? I really don’t have any answers to any of these questions, but it seems that we may need to press pause on the development and use of these technologies to create space for serious conversations about how AI operates in our learning, if environmental impacts are worth the quick benefits, and how we might put some serious legal and ethical guidelines in place to manage this new landscape.
