I started this class on Philosophy and AI with little knowledge of how artificial intelligence works. I’m not exactly a tech-savvy person, so the topics of coding and machine learning were foreign to me. In fact, I hadn’t used AI more than a couple times in my entire life. That said, I still had a relatively strong opinion on AI, which was that the overall usage of it in both our professional and academic settings was wrong. Over the course of taking this class, I must admit that my opinion on AI has not changed, however, our readings and discussions have taught me how to articulate why I have this objection.
Learning how AI works, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), was a very important first step to understanding AI. As I mentioned, I had no idea how chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini were able to generate their responses to prompts, let alone what weights were. The first assigned reading in this class was a clear explanation without computer science jargon, which is where I learned that LLMs are developed through machine learning, a process where the model learns off of large amounts of data rather than instructions. This process also allows for the training of an LLM to be much faster and time efficient. Furthermore, these LLMs are modeled after deep learning, a type of machine learning that basically functions like the neural networks in our brains. This reading helped me understand generative AI as something that generates what it predicts to be an appropriate response to the prompt based on the extensive amount of data it has been trained on prior to receiving the prompt itself. The problem is, we’ve designed AI so much in our own image that it has gotten significantly better at behaving similarly to us, which brings us to the hard problem of consciousness.
Much of our semester was spent discussing whether or not AI is or could become a conscious being. Our class came to the agreement to refer to consciousness as there being something it is like to be that thing. This is a conversation that precedes AI, being found in a wide range of topics from meat consumption to abortion. The issue is that we don’t have a clear definition of consciousness, we only know that we have it and others do too. What’s tricky in determining whether or not another being is conscious is that we don’t want to over generalize our definition to include things that are not conscious (ex: consciousness is being alive, meaning that trees or grass would be considered conscious) and we don’t want to narrow our definition so much as to exclude certain beings that may be conscious (ex: consciousness is in anyone with a language, excluding animals). While I do find this to be a fascinating conversation, I believe that AI being modeled after the human brain raises concerns larger than consciousness, concerns that can be easily observed and applied to our current life.
The thing that stood out to me most over the course of this class is the concerns AI raises to our education. As a college student, this was and still is a big worry of mine. I have seen the effects of convenience and instant gratification in my own life and have observed it among my peers as well. Taking the easy route, procrastination and the use of AI to help complete assignments, disrupts the struggle we all have to experience to a certain extent in order for us to learn and overcome our challenges. Additionally, I attended a talk by Dr. Alan Coverstone on “Reclaiming Human Intelligence”, where he voiced many of my concerns and criticisms of our current educational system. Being a student with ADHD, I saw for myself how schools value certain kinds of intelligence over others. Standardized testing only really measures a student’s ability to memorize information and performance on tests, which is not the same as measuring whether or not the student is actually learning the material or applying what they’ve learned. In other words, these tests prioritize getting the right answer over the process in which the answer is found, and this leaves many students with learning differences behind. This talk made me realize how concerned I was for the integration of AI in schools, which further inspired me in the process of making my final project.
Going forward, I plan on applying what I’ve learned in this class to other settings of my life, mainly my job. As a consultant for the Speaking and Writing Center, I know that my boss has been working on setting up workshops for how to write using AI, and what I’ve learned in this class will definitely help me whenever we end up actually offering the workshop. I will continue to not use AI unless obligated to do so by my boss or professors, but this is a personal choice that I make based around my own tendencies for procrastination and instant gratification. If need be, this class has helped me learn more about how I can use AI in an effective and considerate way for any future assignments or obligations.