Pacific Index

Students give AI a positive, but wary review

 In last issue, we gave Pacific’s professors their moment in the spotlight to share their views on AI. 

Now make room for the students. 

“I think it could be a very useful and helpful tool if it’s used correctly,” admits senior Sydney Cantrell. “I think it’s really important that as people and problem solvers, that we keep trying to work things out for ourselves to keep those skills, but that also for some things it can be super helpful.” 

Cantrell’s opinion seems to reflect those students interviewed for this article, sharing ideas about the technology in a much more positive light than their professors. Most students admitted that AI is a complex topic and overall, it’s a gray zone. AI is neither fully good nor fully bad, but rather a bit of both. 

Cantrell shared a few ways that she’s found the technology to be helpful saying, “When it comes to ideas for something or, you know, writing an email to someone and you’re not sure how to phrase things or editing grammar, or trying to make your own vocabulary bigger.” Of course, there are endless possibilities with AI– that’s sort of its whole selling point. Still, Cantrell had a hard line for things she wouldn’t use AI on. “Some people definitely will just let it do everything for them because it’s so easy,” she expressed. “But I’d like to hope that there are more people who don’t do that. Considering that if we do that in school now, we’re the future health care professionals, and I wouldn’t want my doctor in the future to cheat their way through school with AI.” 

And that right there is the main concern: If students are using AI to breeze through school, then the next generation of professionals will be stumbling around blindly. But Pacific students aren’t ignorant of those concerns and claims. “I think that these years are meant to push us, and help us, and get us workforce ready,” comments senior Anna Emerson. “Using that tool so heavily is not helping us get workforce ready– I think it’s important to have guidelines.” 

Emerson is another supporter of AI usage, but she brings in the belief that it’s not something students should be using at will. “I like that certain professors have been offering portions that teach us how to use it and then also offer us chances to learn and grow individually,” Emerson articulates. She feels that using AI to draft emails, generate images, and create recipes are all appropriate ways to use AI, not to mention that it can be fun. 

Emerson is studying business and marketing, which is one of the first careers that was targeted as replaceable by AI. “I think that at first it worried me a little bit,” Emerson admitted. “But as we see AI enter marketing with companies, it’s pretty clear when it’s being used and I don’t think that it’s as effective. I don’t think the public is accepting it.” 

While she’s not worried that her career path will be taken over by robots, Emerson does find that companies using AI to replace human work is concerning. “I think it’s hard to compare original work to AI because, to me, it just doesn’t compare, but I do think that seeing companies use it to replace human work is sad and pretty unethical,” Emerson comments. “There’s definitely a lot of murky water with the usage, and I hope the more we use it and discover, that the more those guidelines get set.” 

Similar to Emerson, junior Emma Seres shares that while AI may be fun and helpful, it’s not entirely to be trusted just yet. “I think it can be super helpful outside of school,” Seres says.

“Like at work, we were trying to find creative names for coffee drinks, and I’ve used it before to come up with an idea on how to best take care of my plants…I think it’s definitely helpful, but we’ve got a long way to go before we’re super confident in it.” While AI has been steadily evolving, it’s not uncommon to receive wrong, inaccurate information. So, trusting it to name a drink for you or telling you how much sunlight your plants need is probably okay, but you may not get such great results when trusting it to do academic work. 

Doing and explaining are two different things though, and Seres commends AI for its ability to explain academia. “There’s so much math that goes on in chemistry that I never realized, and it did help me a lot last year and the year before in understanding the content in a different perspective,” she explains. Seres admits that she could have gone to tutoring, but in a time crunch, AI was able to break down complicated formulas and explain their workings with ease and expertise. Using AI like this, it’s easy to see why some people claim that AI will be a great teaching tool in the years to come. 

Overall, Seres’ simply says that AI is, “complicated– I feel like there’s benefits and also negative sides to it.” It’s obvious that most students echo these sentiments, which shows the spirit of students at Pacific University. Even though AI is a tempting bit of technology, students are more interested in learning and pushing themselves. There’s no way to tell how things will proceed in the years ahead, but for now, students have shown that they’re not interested in letting AI diminish the work that it takes to earn a degree.