Photo taken by Dennis Jerz at the “Springtime Symposium on Artificial Intelligence”
Written By: Isabel Gerheim
AI is not going away and is continuing to grow. So, as a university, we need to come together and discuss how we are going to use AI and what restrictions are going to be enforced.”
Sophomore English education student, Katelyn Frattaroli stated regarding Seton Hills “Springtime Symposium on Artificial Intelligence” held on April 12, 2024.
The symposium offered a space where students, professors, and staff alike can have an open dialogue about AI and the future of education.
As AI progresses, we see that not only are AI bots throughout social media, but they also have started to make their way into the classroom. This raises concerns about ethical work both academically and career-wise. However, we must learn that AI is a tool, not a reliable source in writing. Thus, it’s imminent that major-focused AI classes are added on campus.
Because generative AI is a fairly new concept, it makes it difficult for teachers, professors, and schools to trust and find any sort of reliability in the software. However, partaking in a class such as “AI & Future Literacy”, benefited my peers and I in learning how to navigate AI into our careers as English majors.
Dennis Jerz’s course titled, “AI & Future Literacy” allowed students to explore AI in career-specific ways to eventually create presentations for a symposium to further academic and work field discussions involving the use of AI.
As a student journalist, I had the opportunity to explore AI dependency and the ethics behind it as it relates to journalism. I divulged my research with AI by exploring how it produced articles and where the issues of morality occurred where it produced false information.
Instead of navigating it in a way that was solely for the intent of producing an article, I learned that AI was helpful when rephrasing the wordiness of my paragraphs as well as producing sufficient headlines for my article. With this information, I learned how to integrate AI into my work, while keeping it ethical and my own, and I was confident in presenting this to members of the University.
“Since every single person in the class had a different topic, experience, and research, different discussions could be had, ” continuing, “ people could take what they learned from one person and build off of that when having other discussions,” Frattarolli stated.
Because of the interactions held at the symposium, it was obvious that this specific class had benefited the students in a way that led us to be confident in the idea that AI doesn’t have the potential to be completely relied on when it comes to work.
“There is only so much discussion and learning that can be done in the class,” Frattarolli stated.
The addition of classes that AI surrounds would benefit students and professors to learn how to navigate AI into how they teach students to integrate it in the future leading to meaningful discussions outside of the classroom and in the actual work field.
As students, we can both shape and control AI and its uses, and this symposium reflected that to our professors. We have the opportunity to show the future that AI bots cannot replace the humanity that goes into our work, so let’s take advantage of that opportunity starting on the hill