concerns over ai use in academic settings

[thursdayrain]

(didnt know where best to put this)

I start college again soon, and recently had the induction day. it was fairly standard stuff - except. one of the activities that we do every induction day each year is make up a class charter (be respectful do ur homework yada yada), and as the lecturer running our induction gathered up the groups suggestions he happily announced "great! I'll hand these over to ai and it will make a stylish poster for our class!".

this was met with "haha our lecturer is so quirky and relatable" reactions, and he further went onto say:"just cause you guys cant use doesnt mean i cant! ive already trained it up on all my teaching materials, and it reads my emails for me " WITH A GRIN?? LIKE THIS IS NORMAL??? AND EVERYONE ELSE LAUGHED IT OFF AND MOVED ON? this man. is the history lecturer.

essentially, i am concerned because:

i am not comfortable with the possiblity that any essay i write for him and frankly for any class will be put through an ai, just so they can streamline their workflow n make marking easier for them. putting aside my opinions on the education system, i believe its only fair students are able to opt out of their work being marked by an ai, and that there should be transparency about ai use by college lecturers - especially when it is being used to create teaching materials and mark assignments. i have other more personal concerns i wont go into here, but this is the big main one.

i bring this to you guys to ask for help and advice. is there anything i can do to prevent my work being put through an ai without my consent?

i understand i may be overreacting with this but i feel its still an important point to make. i have read through the student code of conduct and the course handbook twice now and have found nothing relating to ai use >:/ which tbf the history lecturer did say there was no offical policy on ai use yet. but still. thought thered be SOMETHING. any attempts at research just bring up "kids today are so lazy!! they get chatgpt to write their essays for them!! lazy gen z students!!" which is quite literally the opposite of my problem. if anyone has faced similar issues id be interested to hear because i bet im not the only anti ai student on the planet rn.

[Crazyroostereye]

Yeah, I remember reading somewhere, where more than half of all Teachers use AI¹ to create Work Sheets and other Teaching Materials.
While it is difficult to say what a lot of these People mean under AI as so many actually Ethical and Good tools are label AI. So maybe looking in what tooling he uses would be Helpful. But yeah it reads like he means the Common thing referred as AI, LLMs and Generative Image Generators. But the way you wrote it, it might be interesting to really ask what he means with that, as it also sounds that he actually has a setup with its own AI¹. Which might elevate the Privacy Concern.

But in general I would try to ask that he doesn't use it for your Hand Ins and state your Concerns.

¹In reference to Generative Machine Learning Models commonly associated with the term AI

[TeaInTheMorning]

(didnt know where best to put this)

I start college again soon, and recently had the induction day. it was fairly standard stuff - except. one of the activities that we do every induction day each year is make up a class charter (be respectful do ur homework yada yada), and as the lecturer running our induction gathered up the groups suggestions he happily announced "great! I'll hand these over to ai and it will make a stylish poster for our class!".

this was met with "haha our lecturer is so quirky and relatable" reactions, and he further went onto say:"just cause you guys cant use doesnt mean i cant! ive already trained it up on all my teaching materials, and it reads my emails for me " WITH A GRIN?? LIKE THIS IS NORMAL??? AND EVERYONE ELSE LAUGHED IT OFF AND MOVED ON? this man. is the history lecturer.

essentially, i am concerned because:

i am not comfortable with the possiblity that any essay i write for him and frankly for any class will be put through an ai, just so they can streamline their workflow n make marking easier for them. putting aside my opinions on the education system, i believe its only fair students are able to opt out of their work being marked by an ai, and that there should be transparency about ai use by college lecturers - especially when it is being used to create teaching materials and mark assignments. i have other more personal concerns i wont go into here, but this is the big main one.

i bring this to you guys to ask for help and advice. is there anything i can do to prevent my work being put through an ai without my consent?

i understand i may be overreacting with this but i feel its still an important point to make. i have read through the student code of conduct and the course handbook twice now and have found nothing relating to ai use >:/ which tbf the history lecturer did say there was no offical policy on ai use yet. but still. thought thered be SOMETHING. any attempts at research just bring up "kids today are so lazy!! they get chatgpt to write their essays for them!! lazy gen z students!!" which is quite literally the opposite of my problem. if anyone has faced similar issues id be interested to hear because i bet im not the only anti ai student on the planet rn.

I don't know what to say, besides that "AI" (that term is so semantically bleached at this point) has no place in the workplace, let alone education.

I don't have much advice to offer, but I wonder if you can bring it up with a school official?

[Pearlple]

What you can do depends heavily on local laws and your school's jurisdiction. In most of the EEA for example you should have some sort of official data security officer whose responsibilty is dealing with exactly such concerns. Outside of that it might be difficult, but there should be at least a department to go to with general concerns.

I think all of us here more or less agree concering problems with 'AI', be it privacy, security, reliability, impact on peronal skills of people who use it, lack of awareness for it's shortcomings. Essentially LLMs are just a very well funded and neat sleight of hand grift with no direct path to anything that can really be considered 'intelligence'. A lot of businesses will fall flat and even countries investing trillions in 'infrastructure' for AI right now. Unlike industrial infrastructure this stuff (GPUs and such) has a very short life-cycle and countries won't see any returns on that in half a century; with the exeption of the few investing in energy infrastructure and leaving the risky bits to private companies.