A typical assignment for professor Stephanie Pritchard’s ENG 102 composition class would include a general “Note on AI” description. Scrolling through syllabi for different fall 2023 semester courses across campus brings up a number of addendums to required intellectual integrity statements. With current fast-paced shifts in artificial intelligence, faculty in the English and creative writing departments shared their thoughts on such rapid developments.
Pritchard, on her part, was part of a SUNY system-wide faculty task group researching AI. The group operates under the SUNY Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology (FACT2). The group’s mission was to create a handbook on AI that would then be distributed to professors, librarians and other professionals across SUNY. Pritchard served as co-chair of the group’s sub-committee on pedagogy (teaching methods), which worked alongside two other sub-committees that dealt with defining AI, understanding its capabilities and ethics and testing AI tools and their accessibility. “For a while, everyone was using ‘ChatGPT’ and ‘AI’ almost interchangeably, even though AI has been integrated into our lives for some time now,” Pritchard said, alluding to everyday conveniences such as autocorrect or Grammarly. “When I first began to understand what generative AI was capable of, my first thought was — no exaggeration — ‘well, s***.’”
Fellow English professor and advisor for the medieval and renaissance studies minor Dr. Erik Wade definitely heard that sentiment circulating around last year. “As a faculty member, my first time hearing about it was hearing other faculty talk about it. It was discussed like… a crisis; everyone was panicking,” Wade said. But now, both he and Pritchard say that they have accepted this new reality. “It’s an inevitable technological change. We’ve got to live with it,” Wade said.
“Now that I’ve had some time to really study generative AI, I’m still a little nervous, but I’m also really excited,” Pritchard described.
Another view both professors have in common is that AI cannot and will not replace humans.
“Generative AI can’t do what humans do best, which is be human, […] I don’t believe it will replace teachers anytime soon. Humans crave other humans, especially when we’re learning,” Pritchard said.
Wade added, “There’s no sign it can replace a human. It doesn’t understand what’s going on underneath. It’s making something that looks like thinking with very good imitations, but not a lot of innovation.” Wade had previously tasked ChatGPT to write him an essay analyzing Shakespeare, but what it gave him was riddled with misinformation and incorrect sources.
Despite their similar opinions on these AI programs, Pritchard and Wade differ in their usage, or lack thereof, of conversational language models, like ChatGPT, in the classroom. Aside from a discussion on the first day of class on AI’s pros and cons, “I haven’t changed the way I teach,” Wade said.
“I have no idea how it’s going to go. This technology is going to change the way that I teach and how my students learn. That’s not a bad thing,” said Pritchard, who has begun her first semester integrating ChatGPT into her classes.
Their advice to students is simple: AI is a tool to help, but cannot replace human originality.
“Don’t let it define you or what you create,” Pritchard said.
“Now more than ever, we need human creatives. We need the art that humans are creating to make sense of this world,” Wade said.
Wade went further by linking AI to robotic scabs.
“From these CEOs, there’s a desire for AI to replace writers for ad copy or drafting memos,” Wade said. All a metaphor for cheap and even free labor in Hollywood, AI runs the risk of being salt in the wound during historic Writers Guild and actors strikes.
