Grand Rapids Community College computer science professor Jonathan Resendiz hosted an informational session about the college’s new Artificial Intelligence incubator on Thursday, July 25. The incubator will allow students and the community a hands-on opportunity to utilize the latest technology.
Beginning this fall, the college will offer an AI certificate to keep GRCC students ahead of the curve. In order to earn the certificate, a student must take seven courses where they will spend their semester engaging in projects such as building custom Generative Pre-Trained Transformers, or GPTs, while partnering with local businesses.
Resendiz shared that these classes will be primarily hybrid, taking place in the AI incubator room located in room 133 of the Calkins Science Center. He encourages students to make use of AI, and cited a study done by Harvard Business School, showing that those using AI with training did work faster and created higher quality work.
“You could be talking about having like a 50% increase in what you do,” said Resendiz. “That is really appealing for first-generation college students, people that are adult learners, that are, you know, juggling families and juggling work.”
A graph provided by Resendiz showed bell curves of three groups that illustrated how ChatGPT can help “level the playing field.” He explained that middle-of-the-pack students, with B or C averages, may fall behind compared to students who previously had lower average grades but now take advantage of AI.
Resendiz also discussed different approaches to using AI with methods referred to as the centaur and the cyborg.
He explained the centaur approach as a differentiation between AI-generated ideas and human ideas, saying “You’re going to be controlling the AI, and you need to use AI only on the things that are within that capabilities of AI. Everything else that has to do with a lot of higher level thinking, you should do as a human”
The professor defined things within AI capability as writing decent text, ideation and basic code, while listing stuff outside of AI capability as novel/creative thinking and nuanced writing.
The cyborg approach however blurs the line between human and machine.
“This one is a little bit more deep integration with AI, there’s like no clear line between what is human and what is not human,” Resendiz said about the cyborg approach. “This is what happens when you assign personas, when you assign custom GPTs, and especially when you are asking for prompts that ask for clarification… You tell ChatGPT ‘if you have any questions, let me know, or if you need more information, let me know.’ Then, ChatGPT will ask you questions, and then you start feeding it information, and then it asks you another question, and then you start feeding it. So that back and forth kind of blurs the line of who is doing what part of the work.”
GRCC will be adding an academic policy to class syllabi this upcoming fall, and it is important for students to have the ability to wisely utilize this technology without violating the current academic honesty policy. Resendiz recommends students use AI often to help define where that line is.
“You should use it because the more you use it, the better you’re going to get at it and the better you will know the line, right, of when am I doing this that is cheating and when it’s not,” he said.
