The Pros of AI

In education, artificial intelligence has the ability to open closed doors for students and create a more equitable experience, as it can be used to explain concepts or gain inspiration.

Physics teacher Ryan Johnston believes that students can utilize AI, in specific instances, on their school work. His vision is utilizing AI as a tool which can help explain specific problems or concepts they are having trouble with. 

“I’m sure like any extremely powerful tool, we could use it positively,” Johnston said. “I mean, if you’re genuinely stuck and you’ve thought about the problem for a long time … it can help you over the edge.”

The increase of widespread internet access allows students to take advantage of more information through YouTube and similar platforms to explain various content. AI is able to serve the same purpose, but in a way that targets potential weak points within its users’ content understanding, according to Johnston. He sees this concept being used is for programming classes. 

“If you have a programming problem, you can pick, copy and paste your code there and it will tell you, how you know where the error is, how to solve it, why it’s an error in the first place.” Johnston said. “That’s extremely useful, especially if you’re a beginner programmer, and you’re still trying to learn the ropes.”

The benefits of AI are not exclusive to education or students’ pursuits within STEM. It can also be used as a starting point for more creative tasks. Graphic design teacher Travis Kohler explains how AI art generators, like DALL-E or Midjourney, can be used to give artists a head start of inspiration on the way to creating their own, unique works.

“[AI is] a tool to be used to help create images that should help you make other stuff,” Kohler said. “… It’s the same as if I go to Google and I’m like, ‘How do I draw a dog?’ I need to go look at images of dogs, right?’ I can use that as inspiration but I’m not copying that image for my final product.” 

While AI programs can be used similarly to Google in order to gain inspiration for artwork, the ability to put in specific prompts can help speed up the process. To Kohler, this can make AI-generated art simultaneously more impressive and daunting.

“It’s pretty impressive, the fact that you can put in a prompt [into an AI generator] and it comes out with this artwork,” Kohler said. “Obviously, some of the prompts become better than others and work better depending on how specific you are typing that stuff in. It’s pretty impressive and it’s kind of scary at times.”

With AI like ChatGPT being able to write entire essays at rapid speeds, the English department has especially been affected by this technology now available to the student population. Despite this, English teacher Madeline Byrd thinks that AI could be beneficial to educators if they look at the big picture first. 

“I think it could have some great educational purposes.” Byrd said. “It’s so new though, right now we have to take a step back and look at in what ways is this going to benefit us and what ways can we use this?”