By: Nate Martinez and Ava Domenichelli
Whether the Long Beach State community will perceive technology based on generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom as a beneficial asset or a barrier to learning remains uncertain.
The AI Steering Committee was formed at CSULB “to provide guidance on the exploring, evaluation, and implementation of AI technologies,” according to their website.
Long Beach State Provost Karyn Scissum Gunn, who also serves as a Co-chair on the AI Steering Committee, explained how the university’s stance on integrating AI is reflected in the committee’s decisions.
“In essence, faculty members should communicate with students how AI will be used in a classroom environment,” Gunn said in an email sent to the Daily Forty-Niner.
According to Gunn, the university is still in the process of determining the specifics of how this will manifest in the classroom.
In the meantime, the decision on AI implementation will be left to individual professors.
“We are still in the early stages and are having critical conversations about what AI implementation could look like,” Gunn said. “As of now, we have launched campus-wide access to Copilot, which uses GPT-4 and comes with an added layer of data protection for all campus users.”
Beth Lesen, vice president of Student Affairs and co-chair of the AI Steering Committee, anticipates the expansion of AI technology at Long Beach State.
“There’s a lot of potential and it can be used in so many ways,” Lesen said in an email sent to the Daily Forty-Niner. “Personalized AI assistance may keep students engaged and motivated and lead to improved learning performance and greater academic success.”
Psychology professor Gabriella Hancock specializes in human factors psychology, focusing particularly on interactions between humans and machines.
“If you’re just going and clicking a few buttons, those aren’t the skills you’re developing,” Hancock said. “It comes at the cost of not practicing for yourself. It’s a disservice to the student.”
Hancock also raised questions of ethics that artificial intelligence may lack.
“I have a lot of concerns about safety, security and cultural sensitivity.”
Hancock is not the only one struggling to see how using AI is anything other than an easy way out.
“It hinders your process of learning,” said Lexi Thicksten, a third-year political science major and member of the AI Steering Committee. “The amount of times I’ve heard people using it is insane.”
According to Hancock, this reliance on AI without understanding how it produces its answers is another potential pitfall of utilizing the technology.
“We want to take advantage of those qualities where machines are superior to us, but if we don’t know how it’s doing, what it’s doing, we can’t evaluate the quality of what it puts out,” Hancock said. “That becomes dangerous.”
On the other hand, linguistics professor Sarvenaz Hatami has been a proponent of incorporating AI with teaching methods at CSULB and currently uses it to teach second languages.
On her faculty spotlight page, she posted multiple videos to educate people on the benefits of implementing AI.
“We all know that language learners typically have limited opportunities to practice using the language and to receive feedback,” Hatami said in her video How Chat GPT benefits language students. “ChatGPT however can be a wonderful tool addressing this limitation.”
Students can engage in as many conversations with ChatGPT as they like, whenever and wherever. According to Hatami, they can choose their learning environment to help eliminate any fear of making mistakes.
Hatami also said students can specify their desired areas of study and proficiency level by providing the AI with guidelines.
Usually, these kinds of tasks require one-on-one sessions with a teacher, which is why Hatami believes ChatGPT can be a time saver and a huge benefit for educators.
“There’s some evidence that ChatGPT can help reduce instructors’ daily workload by facilitating certain time-consuming and repetitive tasks,” Hatami said in her video “How language teachers benefit from ChatGPT.”
In a few sentences, teachers can instruct ChatGPT to simplify reading texts, generate tests, quizzes, grades and provide feedback for students.
“While I still needed to review and revise the outcome of these tasks, it still saved a significant amount of time,” Hatami said in her video “How language teachers benefit from ChatGPT.”
While using ChatGPT and other generative systems has presented mutual benefits for both student and teacher, the recency of the technology leaves room for questions.
“While current studies indicate ChatGPT’s effectiveness in language teaching and learning, the evidence is still very limited and so there is still need for further investigation,” Hatami said in her video “What interests Dr. Hatami about the future of ChatGPT.”
Lesen also expressed caution about using AI technology in the future.
“Remember that AI is still evolving and what you get out of it can be unreliable and incorrect, so we need to use it carefully,” Lesen said. “It’s meant to help us, not replace us.”