As artificial intelligence advances, there is a debate whether it’s going to be beneficial for education, or the enemy of it.

Dr. Maggie Herb is a professor in the English department, and does not allow AI to be used in the classroom. On the contrary, Dr. Jie Zhang, a professor in the Sociology department, believes AI is a tool both students and professors should use.

Herb first experienced AI last year within her disciplinary and scholarly community. The people within her community were talking a lot about the subject, and although everyone’s thoughts, including Herb’s, were alarming, she didn’t panic.

“I think my initial reaction was let’s take a step back and think about this a little bit more, and not just sort of jump to that crazy conclusion,” Herb said.

There have been recent concerns for authors and writers with AI easily being able to generate material. Herb understands this concern but feels writing can only be attained from the human mind, not from AI.

“I look at writing as a fundamentally human activity. I think it’s part of who we are – writing stories, telling stories is part of what makes us human, and I think there’s certainly some concerning implications,” she said. “But then I also think, we as humans, there’s so much that that we do that a machine cannot.”

Herb does not encourage her students to use AI on assignments. The assignments focus on the student’s perspectives and their own thoughts. Herb feels this would be unattainable to do with ChatGPT, which is an online AI generator that provides writing prompts and detailed responses.

On the other hand, Zhang not only sees the benefits of AI but encourages students to use it on their term papers.

“Many professors were worried about it because students can use ChatGPT to write their term paper to cheat on the professors, but my argument is different from other professors,” said Zhang. “I think this is new technology, we should take advantage of it.”

Zhang said although the students can use AI, they must check the paper and make sure it was done correctly by indicating on the title page AI was used, and that they used AI as a prompt and not just copying and pasting from ChatGPT.

Buffalo State’s academic misconduct policy lists AI usage under “cheating” and “plagiarism”, but Zhang had a different approach on this matter.

“I told my students, it’s not plagiarism and I encourage them to do it,” Zhang said.

Zhang believes that as long as professors and students learn how to use AI as a tool, there should be no concern about how it could affect the future for writers and education.

“College education is always needed, and AI cannot replace it,” said Zhang. “As a professor, as long as I manage the technology of AI, AI cannot manage me. We should empower AI, instead of AI empowering us. We should take advantage of AI, and be the masters of AI, instead of AI mastering us.”