By Thomas Lepper
Everyone by now knows something about artificial intelligence; either you have used it yourself or you have seen it on the news. The mention of AI has been everywhere. Some people love it for its immense applications for grammar, math or even as simple as drawing a picture. Others may fear and hate the application. As the technology advances, employees in graphic design or visual arts fear their careers may be over due to the convenience of AI. It also does not help that for the last 60 or so years the works of science fiction have shown the worst of AI.
Often in science fiction, AI is usually shown as a highly intelligent computer program that goes ‘rogue’ and wants to eliminate human life. Sometimes it is in the form of complete genocide, with such examples as Skynet from Terminantor or Ultron from Marvel. AI has also been depicted as sentient, like in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey where an AI named the HAL 9000 takes over a spaceship killing the crew on board because they posed an existential threat to HAL’s own existence.
In reality, AI is more mundane — at least for now. Britannica simply defines artificial intelligence as “the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans.”
Even though programs such as ChatGPT have only been around for the past three years, we have been using AI in our everyday lives for at least a decade. Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, was introduced 13 years ago with the iPhone 4s — itself using the nascent AI technology. While a handy tool to check the weather on the go or query traffic conditions for over a decade ago now, it presents problems to a wide variety of industries. AI has been successfully disrupting industries for some time now but it has quickly been picking up its pace in recent years. It is beyond simply searching for topics or playing music. These programs can write articles, fix grammar, summarize long forms of text, and run complex calculations. Already people are using AI instead of doing their own work.
One case in New York dated back to 2023, two lawyers named Peter LoDuca and Steven Schwartz were working a personal injury case and used ChatGPT for their research. Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT hallucinated six false case citations. This caused the judge to dismiss the lawsuit and required the two lawyers to pay a fine of $5,000.
In academia AI has also found its use cases. Students I questioned in STEM fields have stated that their professors allow them to use AI programs. The use cases run the gamut from checking their code, to summarizing documents, and even for data input. Contrast this with the Arts students I have queried, and they state their professors do not want AI to be used for either research or writing. Several professors have adjusted their deliveries, with some holding more written exams instead of type-written essays over fears of students using AI.
With all of that mentioned, how do we at The Brunswickan feel about AI? Well, to borrow a quote from the Co-Director of the Stanford institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Fei-Fei Li, “artificial intelligence is not a substitute for human intelligence; it is a tool to amplify human creativity and ingenuity.”
I could not have written it better myself! Here at The Brunswickan, we believe in our student journalists we employ to write these stories. Our student body does not pay the media fee for AI generated content; they pay for content written by students, for students. The whole raison d’être of The Brunswickan is for students to write about what is going on here in Fredericton and sometimes New Brunswick as whole. While AI can be a fascinating tool that writes thousands of words in seconds, it is not a person nor is it a classmate. It is not someone you see on campus, at the SUB, or your friend. We write to share our experiences with you as students.
It is the same reason professors do not want students using AI to write their essays. If it were simply a matter of presenting a polished essay, professors would simply do it themselves! It is about the learning experience students get by putting in the work, not numbers on a computer. They want to see us write, make mistakes, ask questions, discover, read, write and improve. Not a computer who can spit facts. After all, the Arts are also called the Humanities for a reason!
