For the last lecture of PUB101, we went over topics regarding AI a bit more and ended up being sorted into groups for a discussion on different AI prompts. Specifically, each small group was tasked to discuss the impacts of AI in the different fields of life ranging from AI vs human creativity to AI and education.
My group had gotten the prompt addressing ethical concerns and implications with AI and to consider how we should address the potential biases in AI algorithms. I believe that everyone has a bit of background knowledge on the ethical concerns of AI and what kind of information it generates and presents. Amongst my peers, we had discussed the historical context of machine learning systems, where there is a rich and deep history of bias, discrimination, racism, and oppression, so is our data. Due to that history of infringed data I find it hard to believe that we could reach a future in which AI would be void of bias and ethical concern. I had brought up the example of when Midjourney (AI, text-to-image generator) created an image of our class’ title “publication of self in the everyday life” into one Caucasian male sitting in the centre of the background. Why is there online one person? Why did the default coding end up displaying a male, a Caucasian male or all races and identities?
My classmates had agreed that its impossible to believe that AI can ever be voided of bias within its algorithm and that even with more data and education to supply the machines, the information we give is still biased at the end of the day. Overall, the group discussions at the end of lecture were a great way to recap on what we’ve learnt about AI but also a learning experience as others shared their own opinions and knowledge on the topics. It was beneficial to have these types of discussions around AI considering it’s becoming more common to use within our everyday lives and early exposure to the benefits and harms of AI is nice to have under the belt.
I personally enjoyed the discussion about AI and education where AI has the potential to change the traditional classroom setting of learning and what that means for educational equality. This made me think about the future of AI in schools especially after being notified that some students got a 99% proofing of an AI written essay. Would future courses require students to submit via Turnitin or would that system not be substantial to account for AI written works. How would professors and TA’s go about marking students work – would they simply mark things as is or would they go through a whole process to see if it was plagiarized?
From my peers, there were verbal frustrations of double checking our essays to see how much of essays were “AI-written” even when everything was written by themselves with drafts, notes, and sources referenced. I can understand their pain because you’ve so worked hard to gather sources to write up an essay only for it to be potentially marked as AI written. This gets me thinking whether original ideas are even original when you can have AI write prompts, ideas, and paragraphs of whatever you want it to say. The future of AI is interesting and I’m curious as to see how it’ll play out for future courses and school curriculums.