University, faculty consider threat of generative artificial intelligence in education, society

By LIAM PRICE and ISA SHEIKH associate news editors

The university of notre dame’s campus is buzzing with the recent emergence of artificial intelligence, but its implementation has sparked concerns among students and faculty about the potential loss of jobs and ethical considerations.” as the spring semester begins, an increasing number of conversations in classrooms, faculty offices and dorm rooms have been occurring around the potential of ai in education. in a communication to faculty, sent by the office of academic standards (oas), the chatbot is described as “a large language model, which generates text from prompts by predicting what sentences should follow prior sentences based on historical correlations of words.”

That introduction wasn’t written by The observer. prompted with brief instructions to provide a lede — in ap style — for this story, the artificial intelligence (ai) chatbot chatgpT offered the preceding paragraph, delivering results in a matter of seconds.

The university first took notice of chatgpT in mid-december when a student was caught in a computer class final using the site, according to oas director and faculty honor code officer ardea russo.

The conversational software is often shocking in its speed and capability. directed by The observer, chatgpT created detailed course syllabi with week-by-week specific readings, thematic poems and even songs in the voice of particular songwriters about specific topics.

“i sit behind a desk, with my pen in hand / i’m searching for the truth, in a world so grand,” the chatbot’s simulated Taylor swift wrote — in less than a second — in the opening of a song about student journalism. chatgpT is just one piece of the ongoing artificial intelligence revolution that threatens to remake the ways in which much of the professional and academic worlds function. for instance, google has developed an ai model that generates music based on any text you give it; dall-e, a project of openai, the same research lab that developed chatgpT, can create ai art with strikingly specific results. openai has entered into a contract with microsoft search engine bing, shaking up the future of online searches. already, most interviews conducted by The observer are automatically transcribed using a program called otter.ai.

Courtesy of DALL-E Art made by generative AI when cued with “graphic art for a newspaper with students using artificial intelligence for classwork.”

University response russo said she has been the point person on the administration’s response to chatgpT. under the direction of vice president and associate provost for undergraduate education fr. dan groody, she has convened a faculty working group and sent two communications out to faculty members on the matter. The working group has convened experts from “all over the

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