Reflection 12
This week’s reading on Co-Intelligence opening up with the explanation of the two sigma problem. I immediately knew where Mollick was going with this, as I have experienced this recently in my personal life. When I was writing my thesis, one on one tutoring with my thesis director was extremely beneficial, though not always realistic for the sake of her time. When she introduced me to utilizing AI, my learning process drastically changed and I was able to act more independently. Though maybe not quite reaching the same impact of the in-person tutoring, I still found it to be fruitful.
The discussion on cheating was super interesting to me. Cheating isn’t a new concept by any means, but this is a core reason why AI is so shamed in the academic space. On top of that, I’m willing to bet that most students in our class, if not all, have used AI to cheat in some way or form in the past. Even as an honors student with what I like to think of as pretty strong morals, I have admittedly used it to write papers or finish assignments quickly. I’m not proud of it by any means and I definitely am ashamed to admit that, especially to Meena, but it is a reality of being a sophomore in college that didn’t know a single thing about AI and just knew it helped me get my boring homework assignments done quicker. I haven’t used it in writing or a cheating way since learning about it, also due to maturing immensely and discovering the importance of completing my work for quality and knowledge accumulation sake. Something I actually thought about early on in this course was, “I wonder if I uploaded all of these readings and my previous study abroad blog posts into Chat and worked really hard with the settings and tone (maybe even creating my own GPT now that I know how), could I just essentially fake blog every week and create an assistant that does these reflections for me and pulls out key ideas so I can make sure to talk about those in class?” Meena, I understand you are probably cringing immensely right now, and probably questioning my integrity, but I think it is an interesting idea. AI writing has gotten so good that if I were to do that, though I promise you I am not, I’m not sure if anyone would be the wiser. I would not have received a large part of knowledge that comes with taking this class and doing those readings, but I would have gotten my assignments done much quicker. However, I would be hurting myself immensely in the end and perhaps would not have felt engaged during class discussions or be able to intelligently speak on the creation and use of AI today, as I am now able to with my parents and friends.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading the section on AI being a tutor. For once, I was actually feeling pretty hopeful about the improvements that AI could bring to the education system, empowering busy professors and stimulating students’ minds. I just really do think that students have to be taught how to use it correctly, because although honors college students may care about the implications surrounding relying on AI, I do not think that is a common mindset in the student mind. However, I am hopeful and positive that although education is going to change, we will never stop needing or wanting school and human education. As Mollick stated with the calculators, we will adapt and find a way to simply improve the societal system that we are observing today.
The next section spoke about AI as a coach. Here is where I would like to bring up a point my dad assured me about. I used to always believe that the ‘junior designer’ job position was going to go extinct because of AI. Having brought these concerns to my dad, a software engineer and chief technical officer of his company, he told me that the ‘junior programmers’ had the same fears. But senior designers and humans actually coding these AI systems will not work forever, thus calling for a need of the new generation to step in. If AI takes all of the junior positions for the sake of saving the company’s money and perhaps time, as Mollick mentions in the readings, who will step in to take those higher up human positions when the spot opens up? Humans will always need the next generation underneath them to keep the world spinning. So although some intern like tasks may be lost to AI, the need to be trained and learn in the workforce will not go extinct, at least in my dad’s eyes. This is exactly what Mollick mentions when he says that we are at risk for stopping the pipeline that creates experts. This cannot be a unique thought, I think companies can be short-sighted, only caring about their monetary gain and the risk of a human lessening that.
The last point I really want to talk about is this idea about leveling the playing field with the use of AI. This is something I touched on in class and haven’t quite been able to forget about or reasonably explain. People are now able to do much more complex tasks or complete more intricate jobs because they can utilize AI. I think this brings the idea of integrity in academia into question… Is it fair to have everyone performing on the same level, some utilizing their own intelligence while others are matching them at a cyborg level? Maybe it’s the honors student in me, or the value I understand to be found in hard work, learning from failed ideas, and the increased observation of the world around me, but it doesn’t quite sit right with me yet. Is it right to always make AI super accessible? Are the interfaces too easy to use? These are questions I hope to figure out an answer to someday.
A new AI update that I am interested in is Canva’s release of their new Visual Suite. To be honest, I really wish Adobe would release something like this in their programs so that I could seamlessly work across projects without having to have every single software pulled up. However, the Adobe AI integration into their programs is actually pretty good and a tool I use quite often. It is interesting to see Canva finally start making moves toward that generative design as an Adobe competitor. Something to note is that the reasoning behind Canva being so attractive, besides their pretty reasonable price point, is their interface that is so easy to use. Adobe is not an accessible interface and it takes a lot of time and effort to figure out how to best use those programs. However, Canva is extremely easy to use and they are keeping this consistent with their AI agent: Canva Code. It will be interesting to see how companies utilize this to speed up their marketing and design materials even more.
