Having worked recently with an undergraduate I mentor at Tulane on a math paper analyzing a game on a tesseract (4-D cube), I’ve seen both sides of the AI-in-academics debate. On the plus side, these tools are quite useful in promoting scholarship by tracking down original references which would otherwise be missed. (I remember years ago trying to find a citation for a geometric formula I used in a geophysics article. I eventually found it in a Google Books scan of a 17th century Latin textbook.) On the minus side, my student spent many hours trying to convince ChatGPT to produce a proof of what in reality was a straightforward, three-line algebraic calculation. Somewhere along the spectrum between the two, the student used the tool to help generate a simulator of the underlying mathematical game so that we could experiment with it.
From this experience, I align with professor Monory-Hernández in that students, at least in technical fields, should be challenged to truly think about issues and problems well before bringing AI tools to bear. Otherwise they are doomed to continually repeat the same hope-and-pray searches with all the accompanying risks and drawbacks.
Having worked recently with an undergraduate I mentor at Tulane on a math paper analyzing a game on a tesseract (4-D cube), I’ve seen both sides of the AI-in-academics debate. On the plus side, these tools are quite useful in promoting scholarship by tracking down original references which would otherwise be missed. (I remember years ago trying to find a citation for a geometric formula I used in a geophysics article. I eventually found it in a Google Books scan of a 17th century Latin textbook.) On the minus side, my student spent many hours trying to convince ChatGPT to produce a proof of what in reality was a straightforward, three-line algebraic calculation. Somewhere along the spectrum between the two, the student used the tool to help generate a simulator of the underlying mathematical game so that we could experiment with it.
From this experience, I align with professor Monory-Hernández in that students, at least in technical fields, should be challenged to truly think about issues and problems well before bringing AI tools to bear. Otherwise they are doomed to continually repeat the same hope-and-pray searches with all the accompanying risks and drawbacks.