On Wednesday, Sept. 27th, Chaffey College held a panel discussion for navigating the radical landscape of AI.

By Tristan Ell

On Wednesday, Sept. 27th, Chaffey College held a panel discussion for navigating the radical landscape of AI. AI has been a big talking point in the world of education and has many positives but also many drawbacks that were explored in this discussion.

What does AI have the power to do and how can we navigate the use of AI?

AI has proven to have the power to do a lot of different things through its large language model which is made to predict a word, sentence, phrase and more. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to write a congratulatory email. It’s then going to generate a response based on the data collected through its large language model.

AI also has the ability to create different types of digital artwork which was presented throughout the discussion. The audience saw the many different requests that led to many different results.

AI tools showed many flaws such as an essay example where the essay prompt wasn’t directly answering the question that was being asked. Flaws were also shown in the artwork as it didn’t always replicate what was being asked.

One of the speakers at the panel discussion, English instructor, Laura Picklesmier, spent a lot of time going over sites like ChatGPT.

In a recent interview, Picklesmier said, “I was excited to hear from everyone and share some of the experiences I’ve had using AI’s writing features, which include popular large language models like ChatGPT and Bard, alongside more specific tools like Character.AI.”

When asked how she’s had to adapt to changing landscape, Picklesmier said “It’s my opinion that if an assignment can be immediately answered by ChatGPT in its entirety, then the assignment wasn’t an authentic, valuable assessment to begin with.

“Performing basic tasks like summarizing chapters or memorizing facts without that critical thinking component don’t really benefit students - and now can be completely performed by AI.” said Picklesmier

One of the people that attended the discussion was the Dean of instructional support at Chaffey, Andrew Long.

When asked about why he attended the discussion he said, “This is the future and it’s not going away. The campus community is ready to have these conversations and ready to have these in ways that are valuable to students.” said Long

There’s no telling where AI will go in the future and only time will tell as to what it can be here at Chaffey.

Chaffey Panel Discussion: AI Navigation