Political scientist David Schultz just concluded his semester-long experiment at Hamline University in St. Paul that allowed students to use ChatGPT and other AI chatbots for their coursework.
The result?
"No kid is wowed by it," Schultz said. "That's what is so interesting to me. Nobody is like, 'I gotta use this stuff all the time.'"
College-age adults have already seen a lot of fascinating innovations in their young lives. Cars that are nearly autonomous, rockets that take off and land on the same launch pad and any piece of information or entertainment at their fingertips. It's all normal to them.
And so AI chatbots — and the language modeling they're based on — amount to just another new tool to them. None of the students I watched in two of Schultz's courses this semester found that ChatGPT could substitute for their own thinking and writing.
"It's a really strong language model and that's really impressive," Ian Creech, a student in Schultz's Ethical Policy class, said. "It's not generating original thought. It just pulls it from everywhere else."
In many ways, I'm heartened by the modest impact AI had on the Hamline students. They weren't able to cheat their way through school with it. And it didn't impose conclusive ideas to the knotty tradeoffs Schultz taught them, a limitation that appears to be deliberate in ChatGPT but that may be different in future types of AI systems.
The fear educators had about ChatGPT when it was publicly released a year ago has subsided, Schultz said. However, he added, "I still think most of my colleagues are leery about it and don't know what to do with it."
Schultz and his students in two courses patiently let me watch them at the start of the semester, just before the midway point and again last week.
In that first week, Schultz encouraged students to turn to chatbots to seek answers anytime they wanted. He was asking big questions, however, often with no precise answer.
One was, "Who governs America?" That was the first question he wrote on the board in the Intro to Political Science course and, ultimately, it became the topic of the course final.
By midsemester, it was clear AI could only go so far in helping students. In the last session of the Intro class, one student said he thought it was great for helping him create an outline for an essay. He added, "I still form my own response."
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His classes weren't the place to see some of the promise that AI holds for improving productivity and diminishing routine work — the things that investors are betting billions of dollars on. Those changes are more visible in computer science, mathematics and engineering courses.
At the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, professors are rapidly changing courses to allow students to use generative AI tools. A board of employers who advise the school urged it.
"Employers want their new hires to be well-versed in generative AI, and be able to contribute to the company's journey of figuring out how best to leverage such a technology," said De Liu, professor in decision sciences and director of the Carlson School's master's program in business analytics.
To give his students a sense of the growing importance of AI, Schultz suggested that next year's U.S. presidential election will be the first to be affected by it, though it's difficult to know precisely how.
For a comparison, he described how Barack Obama's 2008 run for president marked the first major use of Facebook and social media by a major U.S. political figure. That happened when the students were kindergartners. "I realized how little they understood this," Schultz said.
In the last session of the ethics class, Schultz asked whether the only student-athlete in the class, a woman on Hamline's track team, should be paid in the way that athletes are at bigger schools like the University of Minnesota.
The woman said no, but the discussion spiraled into speculation about pay for other student activities, such as the actors in the university theater. Eventually, the question came up about whether college should be free. Schultz suggested that someone ask ChatGPT.
"I notice anytime you put in an ethical question, it answers, 'This is a complex situation,'" one woman observed, leading other students to laugh.
Any other answer would be pretty unsettling.
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