The Lumina Foundation provided a $200,000 grant to the City University of New York (CUNY) in August to create teaching tools for the ethical use of generative artificial intelligence, to be published by faculty across CUNY in the open educational resources next spring.
The funding was distributed among 30 faculty members to create “hands-on project assignments and materials to develop students’ AI literacy,” according to an official press release.
The use of AI has been a persistent headache among faculty since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. Many students use the AI tool to generate responses to assignments in an effort to meet tight deadlines, but this has raised an array of ethical questions for faculty and academia as a whole, including whether it can be used to enhance or detract from the student learning experience.
Professors Jorge Alves and Julie George from the Political Science department provided their thoughts about the use of AI in their classrooms and some of their hopes for the future of generative AI at CUNY.
“I’ve had multiple fully AI generated work [submitted] in each class every semester,” Professor Alves said. “Some students who aren’t committed to or don’t see the value in college education clearly feel enabled to offload thinking and doing work to AI.”
The presence of AI can reduce the college experience to a hustle to achieve passing grades and relinquish the development of essential skills that the coursework can bring. At its current use, AI tools may give students a shortcut for meeting their word counts, but rarely do they produce work that professors will actually find convincing.
“There are no perfect ways to screen for AI use technologically. But we can often tell, because the writing has a particular style,” Professor George said.
Students were generally hesitant to report on their uses of AI. One student, who spoke to The Knight News on the condition of anonymity, stated they use AI to “help with” their assignments.
The student explained that AI helps create a starting point for them, cleaning up any grammatical or structural errors and allowing them to edit and organize from there. Using AI-powered engines like Perplexity also assists them in finding sources for research papers, summarizing key points to more efficiently find relevant material.
“I wish there was a better way to sift through documents, but AI helps. Of course, using AI to write your paper for you, or plagiarism, is unfair, I would think,” they said.
Such uses of AI provide some optimism for faculty about the use of the tool for their assignments. Professor Alves and Professor George both expressed their hopes that the Lumina grant will open opportunities for students to see the greater value of college, despite the introduction of AI into the academic toolkit.
“The more students understand what they are meant to be learning in the writing process, the more they’ll understand how AI can undermine those learning goals,” Professor George said.
The main issue centers on when generative AI takes over the entire writing or revision process. New tools aim to promote AI as an aid for writers rather than a replacement, striking a balance between students’ needs and academic expectations. They may also address concerns about reliance on copyrighted material, a criticism of AI developers like OpenAI.
Faculty members face a significant challenge in resolving these academic issues, and CUNY has yet to outline its specific approach. The Knight News reached out to CUNY regarding their specific plan for handling such an undertaking, including how these tools will assist faculty, what this will look like for students, and what issues they hope to address surrounding the use of AI. CUNY has not responded as of Sept. 22, 2024.
Even so, the capability of generative AI to help students improve their writing is arguably as strong as its capability to undermine it.
Notably, Queens College Service Corps provides a resume workshop to its cohort each year, bringing on career coaches from QC’s Career Center who recommend feeding completed resume drafts into ChatGPT to help clean up inconsistencies and to help implement more professional language. Generative AI can also be used to briefly summarize the main arguments of short academic papers for research assignments to see whether they were relevant to the focuses of student projects.
Whatever the new tools will provide, the Lumina Foundation grant will hopefully be a first step in making AI a safer tool for students to use, and provide greater cohesion between students and faculty.
