Artificial intelligence became a part of everyday life. People utilize AI to draft emails, aid in brainstorming ideas and more. There were multiple AI programs, including Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT and Gemini.
Dr. Mark Kim, associate professor of data science and computer science, first started the discussion by sharing how he used AI in his life.
“Yes, I use AI tools… that’s what it is. It is a tool. It was designed to help us accomplish some kind of task or work. In our case, as knowledge workers here at the university, AI is an effective tool that students benefit from. The idea is efficiency and an increase in productivity,” Kim said.
Students also can use this tool as an aid. Amelia Ratzlaff, sophomore architecture major, said, “Personally, I don’t use it, but I know people will use it to get ideas for projects or topics on papers.”
AI is a free resource, when used correctly for students compared to other options. Katja Young, sophomore exercise science major, said, “It is a helpful study tool. It is like a free tutor. Even professors use AI, it just looks differently to students use.”
Kim utilizes AI to help him be more present in other situations.
“[AI] allows us to get a ton of tasks done faster, which means I can spend less time doing administrative stuff and more time meeting students on a more personal level,” Kim said.
He addressed that AI was a tool and that people should work with technology, expressing that humans and machines could work well together.
“We call this human-machine teaming (or human-computer interaction). The idea is that you should complement each other. Humans are good at being creative and innovative. Machines are good at automating repetitive tasks,” Kim said. “We are at the first inning of AI. Right now, AI is changing so rapidly. We are still trying to figure out the right way to use AI.”
Kim mentioned that no AI program was necessarily better than another. However, effectiveness depended on how one prompted the AI tool.
“Microsoft Copilot is simply going to be for coding, so anyone who programs would want to use Copilot in that respect because that is what it is designed for… The act of giving instructions to an AI assistant is called prompting,” Kim said.
Kim encouraged students to learn the technology and how it worked, optimizing its abilities as a tool rather than a replacement for human effort.
“One of the things students should look at is learning how to interact with the machine to figure out what it is capable of doing… The true way to get a hold of that is learning how to prompt these large languages. We have, from private to public, large language models, hundreds of different types of ChatGPTs and others. I would encourage students to try to prompt and interact with these large language models,” Kim said.
AI programs depended largely on how users interacted with them. Their effectiveness varied based on prompting techniques and how they were utilized.
