Last semester, a professor asked my class to open our laptops, pull up ChatGPT, and ask it to generate alternate titles for our end of semester research project. Then, we were asked to have it reorganize our paragraphs so that our ideas would seamlessly tie together. I would very much rather open up a blank page.
In another class, a professor told us he knew we would use AI anyway, so we might as well use it together. “Ask it for titles for your video essays,” he suggested, as many others have after him.
I am a senior now and I have spent my time at Rollins learning that the hardest part of any paper is the first idea; I was brought up in school believing that no one would hand it to me either. Now I am being handed it, politely, by people I respect.
The announcement
Last spring, an email reached our student inboxes about a new “Certificate in Data Analytics with AI.” It was labeled as a “cutting-edge certificate program” that “equips students with in-demand skills in data analysis and artificial intelligence that are redefining the future of career growth.”
According to Rollins’ own page, the program is a 16-week, part-time course of study for professionals with no tech background required. It costs $4,000, and teaches R, Python, and AI prompt engineering, along with the ethical, social, and legal aspects of data analytics. Its faculty director has stated that the goal is to teach students to evaluate AI-generated code and “adapt” as technology changes.
This was just one piece of a larger push. Rollins now also offers a four-course, 12-credit AI certificate for liberal arts undergraduates, whose director, Dan Myers, said “We want every student who graduates from Rollins to be AI literate.” The business school has now also launched a center aimed at becoming a national hub for applied AI.
There is no question that AI is already being used as a tool. It is fast, however I do not think anyone has considered the things we give up at that speed.
2023
I recently spoke with Susan Libby, professor emerita of art history and studio art at Rollins, and her last year of teaching, 2022 to 2023, was the year ChatGPT became popular. In an introductory art history course, she told me a student turned in a paper she could tell right away came from ChatGPT. It was, in her words, “so obvious.”
In a studio class, she explained the professor watches you work, so “cheating” would be easier to catch. But what worried her more than the cheating was the students’ mindsets. AI makes education look “even more transactional than it’s already been made to look,” she said, with students (really, she added, their parents) as customers consuming a product and expecting quality back.
Then she said the thing I wish I heard more often in my major that is so driven by art and creativity: “I would much rather read papers written by students who don’t write that well, [because] those have personality.” Hand a professor fifteen papers, she said, and each will differ, because each person thinks differently. “I just don’t like the idea of taking that away from anybody.”
“Failure to launch”
That preference runs against a system built on suspicion, and it is not a popular one. A Stanford study tested seven AI detectors and found they wrongly flagged over half of the essays written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated, with an average rate of about 61 percent, while being near perfect on essays by US eighth graders. The researchers suggested that these tools may penalize writers with “limited linguistic expression.”
The detector many colleges, including Rollins, use is Turnitin and its early record is a story of its own. Before its AI tool launched in April 2023, a Washington Post columnist tested it with five high school students and 16 samples of real, AI-generated, and mixed writing. The tool got six right and three wrong and it flagged part of one student’s original essay, a high school senior who got an A. However, Turnitin staff said those kinds of errors were rare and that the score should prompt a conversation, not deliver a verdict. Their vice president of AI said that the tool is supposed to flag writing that is “consistently average,” and that students in fields with set styles, like economics, are more likely to be misread.
This is a kind of story I know too well and have heard many times before. One where those who refuse to turn to automation become too afraid to be seen trying and be punished with a harsh grade for scrambling their words. At Rollins, the rules around AI certainty vary from class to class. Turning in AI-generated work and claiming it as your own is a violation of the Academic Honor Code unless a professor has approved it; however, the limits that the code has placed around AI are not so clear now.
“Anything goes”
Walk inside Tarpotle and you’ll find an AI generated visual of a girl holding up a coffee cup on the screen. A quick Google search or a visit to the Olin Archives will reveal to you that this does not look like the visuals we used to have around before.
A prompt typed into a generator is “not art to me at all,” Libby said. New technologies have been dismissed as not real art for centuries, she noted, and she can imagine an artist using AI honestly to critique AI itself. “I’m not advocating for using AI to make imagery at all.”
In a written statement she shared with me afterward, she put it in perspective:
“Starting in the 20th century in the US and Europe, artists started intentionally challenging concepts of art. They used ‘non-art’ objects, or they copied the imagery of popular culture, as in Andy Warhol’s soup cans. But those artists weren’t trying to substitute one difficult medium (in Warhol’s case, printmaking) for an easier one or trying to trick anyone.”
AI is different, she wrote, because of motive:
“AI’s potential for trickery shows their producers’ disdain for creativity and difficulty (in the sense that art takes work), and it profoundly disrespects artists of any kind. And if it’s used to get people to believe things that aren’t true, then it’s unethical.”
Our “why”
I believe Rollins deserves its best argument. I also do not know exactly what led to the crafting & funding of this program, and I don’t think it would be fair to pretend that I do. The program itself was presented mostly through the language of career preparation, it places an emphasis on all of the skills students can get from it and the changing demands of the job market. It also sits within a college that has built much of its identity around the liberal arts.
So what does this mean for a liberal arts college to make AI literacy part of its future? There is a reasonable argument that staff and faculty should understand that AI has already redefined the way people work. But there is also the question of what happens to the things that are harder to measure: the anxiety of handing in your first draft, trying to find you creative voice in a million different ways, checking in on how everyone is doing with that paper and complaining about the length, bonding in that way, sitting with your struggles and understanding what they ask of you. And as a film minor, I think about that question from a particularly small corner of campus. I don’t know what this means for the future of the program, but it does make me wonder what kinds of subjects will receive attention as Rollins decides what skills its students will need next.
What’s left to certify
For Libby, the bigger concern is what we lose when the struggle disappears.” A certain amount of struggle in whatever you’re doing is a good thing,” she told me. What she fears is the alternative: if you can’t even find an idea on your own, she asked, what are you, “an AI drone for the rest of your life?” We went on to discuss other costs too. In Libby’s words, “the proliferation of AI could create one class of creators and another of copiers. The science/technology that goes into creating AI seems amazing to me. But I can see it producing a class of (extremely rich) experts who produce and develop things and ideas, while an underclass and labor force that’s not expected to come up with ideas just pushes buttons to make something happen in mysterious ways.”
Our faculty seems to be set on what our future looks like; their drive for an automated campus told us so. But they have not told us who gets to write it. It is likely that in the following months and years, you will be asked to type a prompt to generate a poster, a paragraph, or perhaps perform a statistics test. This will not be perceived as “immoral” or be penalized, but no one will ask you to think about what or who you lose by not knowing the “how to” either. You must remember that there is a life beyond these four years, and it requires all of you in a thousand ways that AI cannot show up. The next time you are asked to open up ChatGPT, I strongly encourage you to choose the blank page.
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