How artificial intelligence is reshaping college for students and professors

Amna Nawaz:

This year's senior class at universities across the country is the first to have spent nearly its entire college career in the age of generative A.I., a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content like text and images.

As the technology improves, it's harder to distinguish from human work, and it's shaking academia to its core with some very big questions.

Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro has the story for our series Rethinking College.

Megan Fritts, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Arkansas, Little Rock: And the principle of humanity says, treat all people as ends in themselves, never merely as means.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

About two years ago, Megan Fritts, a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, began spotting something unusual about her students' writing.

Megan Fritts:

You suddenly get an essay or a test answer, some kind of assignment from a student whose normal writing you're familiar with, and you get something back that sort of sounds like an official business document or a piece of technical writing, writing that sounds very highly polished, but very impersonal.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Impersonal because it likely wasn't written by a person. This was the beginning of a turning point for higher ed, as generative A.I. had swept through not only her campus, but college campuses across the country.

A survey last year found that 86 percent of college students are now using A.I. tools like ChatGPT, Claude A.I., and Google Gemini for school work. The reason generative A.I. has spread so quickly on college campuses is not hard to understand. It's transformed tests that used to take hours, even days of writing and revision into something that can be done in mere minutes.

For example, I can ask ChatGPT, write me a 1,000-word essay on the topic of "Is it OK to lie?" And using a massive amount of data, it predicts and generates sentences on this topic instantly.

Fritts says the impact has been deeply disruptive.

Megan Fritts:

If I'm reading the writings of ChatGPT, instead of my students, I have lost the very best tool that I have to see if I am being effective in my capacity as an instructor or not.

Brian Berry, Vice Provost, University of Arkansas, Little Rock: We really need a framework in which people can use these things and innovate while minimizing the risk.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

University policymakers have scrambled to stay ahead.

Brian Berry:

I think the realization over the past year-and-a-half is the technology is outpacing our ability to detect it.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Vice provost of research Brian Berry leads one of U.A. Little Rock's committees tasked with creating clear campus-wide policies on A.I.

Brian Berry:

I think it really comes down to us helping students understand what's at risk, helping them understand that, if they use A.I. in the right way, it's literally the most powerful tool that they have ever been able to use, and it will make huge differences. But if they use it in the wrong way, it could short-circuit their learning process.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

The university is finalizing a policy that lets professors determine what A.I. use is acceptable in their classrooms, as long as they clearly outline it in their syllabus.

But, for Fritts, who has a strict no-A.I. policy, identifying it has been complicated and time-consuming.

Megan Fritts:

So, Phrasly is one of the softwares that I use. If I suspect A.I. use, then the first thing I do is I do use detection softwares. I actually use eight different detection softwares.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

If her suspicion is confirmed, she does meet with the student.

Megan Fritts:

And if they can talk about the thing that they wrote about, then great, but a lot of times they can't.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

It sounds like it's tedious and a lot more work for professors like yourself.

Megan Fritts:

It certainly cuts into my life quite a bit. It at least has sometimes made teaching feel like policing.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

And these detection methods are not foolproof. Students online say that they're caught in the middle.

Woman:

I have been falsely accused by my University of using A.I. to write a paper.

Woman:

My final paper got detected as 60 percent A.I.

Ashley Dunn, Recent Graduate, Louisiana State University:

We might be about to find out if I'm going to falsely get kicked out of college for…

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Ashley Dunn was a senior at Louisiana State University when she was accused of using A.I. to write a short essay for a British literature class after a detection tool flagged her writing last year.

Ashley Dunn:

And I was like, am I going to fail this class? Am I going to get a zero? Every college takes plagiarism and that kind of thing very seriously. So I was just freaking out.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

After communicating with her professor, Dunn says she was eventually given an A for the assignment, but the response to her on TikTok proves that this is a widespread issue.

Ashley Dunn:

A lot of people ended up making responses to my video pretty much saying that they had gone through the same thing, but that they didn't really get as lucky, that they ended up either getting zeros or failing the class.

Some people recently have been making videos about, oh, my professor said that my essay was A.I. because I used an em dash. But that's just a regular way of writing, especially for a college level.

Lori Kendall, Professor, The Ohio State University:

You're going to be asked to go out and venture into gen A.I.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Not all schools are anti-A.I. Some are actually looking for ways to embrace it.

Lori Kendall teaches an entrepreneurship class in the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University.

Lori Kendall:

When gen A.I. came out, I and every other instructor did, oh, great, now what? Do we allow A.I.? Do we not allow A.I.? And the reality is, you know what, they're going to use it anyway.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

She now encourages her students to use A.I. to critically examine their original work and as a learning aid.

Rachel Gervais, Undergraduate Student, The Ohio State University:

A lot of people might use A.I. just to get assignments done, plagiarism, but I like to use A.I. just for a deeper understanding.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Rachel Gervais is a first-year student majoring in air transportation.

Rachel Gervais:

I will oftentimes use A.I. to create questions regarding this topic, so I not only get a better understanding of the actual material, but I also can test and see what I need to maybe focus on even more.

Lori Kendall:

If you don't use A.I. or the next technology that comes along to be more effective, you're not going to be competitive in the job market. The job market's changing right underneath your feet.

Ravi Bellamkonda, Executive Vice President and Provost, The Ohio State University: As the chief academic officer, I get to decide on academic integrity issues, honor code and violations.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Ravi Bellamkonda is executive vice president and provost at Ohio State University. He says he was struck by one alleged violation last year, a student accused of using A.I. It was a case of cheating, he says, but it made him think.

Ravi Bellamkonda:

What if there exists a technology that indeed lets our students produce work of very high quality? Shouldn't we investigate this a little further?

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Bellamkonda spearheaded Ohio State's new A.I. fluency initiative, which requires all undergraduate students across academic disciplines learn and use A.I. tools.

Ravi Bellamkonda:

The trick is to figure out, like any human interaction with technology, what can be off-loaded to technology and what do we need to add the value to? Ohio State wants to be at the front of that creation of those rules.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

That's prompted experimentation across the disciplines, like music professor Tina Tallon's A.I. and music class, which explores innovative uses of the technology.

Tina Tallon, Professor, The Ohio State University:

I always start the class by asking them to think about a challenge in their field. At that point, we're not even talking about A.I. I just want them to identify something that either they have run up against or that their students or their colleagues have.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

One member of her class, tuba instructor and doctoral student Will Resch (ph), is using A.I. to analyze airflow into his instrument over thousands of repetitions. The data will help guide students on how to play the perfect note.

Another, Natalia Morano-Britrago (ph), is a music education grad student studying how babies acquire musical knowledge. She used to spend hours combing through home recordings of research subjects, listening for moments when parents or caregivers sing or hum around the infant. Now A.I. does this for her.

Tina Tallon:

If we critically examine the tools that we're engaging with and are actively involved in the development of them, I think we can do some pretty incredible things.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

But, inevitably, these tools also bring major disruption to academia and to the jobs students hope to someday fill.

Ravi Bellamkonda:

How do we go through a transformative moment like this with the disruptions that it is going to cause, and yet do this in a way that ultimately is additive to us as a society, that it improves our lot as human beings?

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

A question without a clear answer, he says, but one that students should help tackle.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Fred de Sam Lazaro in Columbus, Ohio.