By: Noa Guest, Junior Computer Science Major

As a college student, I find that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is unavoidable. Some of the biggest GenAI-haters I know have admitted to using it to cheat in their online classes. Many students have given up and have turned to AI to manage large course loads. Professors are even encouraging students to use it in assignments. Used by both professors and students, GenAI is as prevalent as ever in universities. But should it be? In this two-post series, I explore how professors can change the way they use AI in assignments and how academia can better encourage students to flourish in an AI-driven workforce.

In my first post, I describe my experience using AI as a Computer Science student. I explore how professors could optimize their AI implementations in assignments, excluding it from foundational courses and focusing its use in upper-level courses. There, it can be useful in speeding up slower tasks, studying high-level material, and teaching students to be better, in terms of skill, than AI.

My second post expands on course implementation from the first, but I focus on the “AI will take student’s jobs” argument. In my experience, instructors and professors talk about AI in ways that make students feel unable to “beat the machine.” I talk about how professors could improve their rhetoric around AI, emphasizing that their intention is to arm students with the skills necessary to outperform AI or to negotiate when to use it and when not to in the workplace.

With these posts, it is my hope that professors and instructors at universities will be able to better incorporate AI in future courses, whether that is complete omission or a tactful implementation designed to teach counter-AI skills. My classmates and peers at universities all around the country do not feel like we are adequately represented in the college and AI conversation. Professors and college students should be a team in building a workforce that is equipped to combat AI job outsourcing and other harmful uses of the technology, and I firmly believe this team will influence the future if students are given the resources by professors to do so.