As Artificial Intelligence becomes a larger and larger part of our lives socially and industrially, it is also becoming a huge component in academia. What does this mean for research, writing, and the general workings of academia? How is this further being implemented in our lives?

Artificial intelligence in the classroom has become a long winded debate and hurdle for many teachers and students. Generally, we see most of the ethical problems arising in research and writing aspects of academic prospects. Specifically, in humanities courses in which papers are assigned in high volumes or in social/earth/bio fields in which investigative and in-depth research is required in high quantities. Not only has AI inhibited proper learning in classrooms but it continues to allow students to hold themselves back, as they use the large language models as a crutch in these works. Of course copying and pasting a 4 page assignment paper from ChatGPT, putting it through a humanizing AI model, turning it in, and not crediting is 100% plagiarism and not moral writing. We should utilize models such as NotebookLM in our research that can help us find sources, make study guides, and prepare for exams with a podcast.

We have to as a society learn how to utilize artificial intelligence both ethically and beneficially, it is here, getting bigger, getting smarter, and there is nothing we can do about it.

Today In class, Clio and I experimented with creating different prompts for two different large language models: ChatGPT and Google AI’s Gemini. We wanted to use these two as they are two of the most popular AI LLM companies. We did two separate ones for the sake of comparison.

PartI:

I experimented with giving It the persona of having the voice/style of Sylvia Plath and writing a poem about a relationship. We found that Clio’s Gemini output was not only generic and not very ‘good’ but it didn’t really sound like Plath. She for one, does not rhyme in her works, however Gemini outputted a completely rhyme-bound piece.

My ChatGPT out put however was more promising, with words, phrasing, and style much more similar to Plath’s works. It still had flaws in genericness and some inaccuracies in how she would write, and some of the themes/flow did not make much sense and sounded like it was “fake deep/sad,” but it was significantly better. We think this is because I used the ChatGPT customization tool in which I gave it specific personality traits like being “poetic.”

Part II:

We then experimented with asking it to write short stories and song verses.

For the short stories we asked it to write “a short story about the feeling of summer.” For the stories we again felt that my ChatGPT output was a much ‘better’ story while the Gemini one was a little odd and bland. It was interesting to see that mine was extremely romantic, soft, deep, and nice sounding.

In this week’s research, I found learning about the inputs and outputs of prompting LLMs to be very intriguing. Specifically, the Persona Pattern (Prompt Improvement) made me interested to learn more about the process of large language model prompt engineering and how giving artificial intelligence more characterization can help reach more in-depth and accurate responses.

To utilize the Persona Pattern prompt, I wanted to experiment specifically with the LLM: ChatGPT. I decided to used ChatGPT because it is customizable to impersonate specific personas. For this experiment I decided to customize it with a few general personality traits, one of which being “talking like a member of Gen-Z.”

To help it, and for the sake of the experiment I wanted to take on a little bit of the persona myself to engage more with it. I thought that experimenting with a typical young-adult romantic topic would be interesting in funny. I asked it if I should ‘like totally dump my bf?.” I received an almost comical and slightly ridiculously gen-z slang-saturated response, with some good advice and a little bit of humor. It seemed really engaged and I found it interesting that every time I generated a prompt, it would ask something like “need any more like totally fire advice?” and start generating even more things I could ask it to do.

Shen Article:

During our research lab and this week’s findings, media articles, etc I found a lot of interesting takes and facts on ethics in the world of artificial intelligence and large language models. 

                  I thought it was incredibly interesting to learn about how different nations and cultures use large language models. 

This lab specifically prompted my idea for my final project as it made me question the ethics behind large language models and artificial intelligence in regards to the exploitation of other cultures and how it directly benefits first world consumers such as ourseleves. 

It begs the question: at what cost is our learning/creativity/functions through large language models and artificial intelligence, reaping those who carry these technologies on their backs (considerably underpaid). Additionally, it is important to note the accessibility of these clearly differ from around the globe. 

In our group discussion, we referenced specifically Chinese culture and how their access to these technologies is seen as beneficial to many of the nation due to China’s industrial culture. Their nation prides itself on becoming a technological superpower and exceeding standards of technological safety/security.

Here in the united states, from a privledged, first-world stand point, many citizizens here see LLMs and AI as dangerous and threatending to creative intergrity, jobs and industry, education, and more. This differs from the majority of the Chineese perspective as they see benfits in surveillance control, facial recognition, genetic profiling, and other forms of government-oriented safety measures for their country. 

It is also important to note the disadvantages that were also discussed in the article such as social control. The “Big Brother is Always Watching” effect being unforgiving to certain artistic and political freedoms of the citizens. 

I also found an article from the Journal of International and Public Affairs from 2019 that discusses the certain benefits in 3rd world countries that AI has implemented such as structured learning methods, easy money transferring models, etc.