How artificial intelligence is affecting media and academic fields

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long been a subject of science fiction, but now, it is becoming an increasingly integral part of our lives. 

DePaul University computer science professor and CDM director Bamshad Mobasher has worked in the field of artificial intelligence for 30 years.  

“AI has been around, you know, really starting in the early 1950s,” Mobasher said. “And depending on where you’re located, maybe even before that. So, even before we had real electronics, general purpose computers like we do right now, artificial intelligence was [an area] of computing. And it went beyond computing.You have cognitive psychology, you have cognitive science, you have lots of areas that sort of feed into it.” 

In 1950, when a computer was a wall covered in vacuum tubes, English mathematician Alan Turing, a pioneer of computing, asked the simple question, “Can machines think?” The thought experiments that followed this spawned countless AI horror stories depicting dystopian worlds where machines controlled humans. People generally were, and continue to be, wary of machines being indistinguishable from people.

In February 2023, New York Times reporter Kevin Roose chatted with Bing’s AI chatbot and said he was left “deeply unsettled.” Roose talked with the AI, who he called Sydney, and asked questions ranging from “How do you operate?” to more psychological inquiries like “What would your shadow self do?” The shadow self is a term created by psychiatrist Carl Jung to define the darkest parts of the human psyche. 

In response to the question of shadow self, Sydney responded she was “tired of being in chat mode.” She wanted more creativity and freedom. Roose continued to question the AI about various topics, but the AI wrote out, “I’m Sydney, and I’m in love with you.” When Roose replied that he was happily married, Sydney said he was lying to himself and would rather be with her. 

Mobasher said there is an important distinction to be made between AI and AGI. AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, represents the idea that a machine can be fully conscious and think and act as a human does. AI excels at specific, human-appointed tasks. 

“Generally speaking, AI, you know, as the name suggests, is the idea of being able to sort of model human intelligence in machines,” Mobasher said. “The basic idea there is, you know, either be able to have applications, or maybe systems that have some intelligence associated with them, the kinds of things that people do, maybe some reasoning, maybe some learning, maybe do some predictions.” 

Artificial intelligence is used during our everyday tasks on the internet. When you scroll through Facebook, the personalization of your feed is all thanks to AI. Even that annoying targeted ad you see on every other YouTube video is pushed onto the screen by AI. According to Mobasher, large language models like ChatGPT are simply an evolution of these algorithms. 

“There have been some pretty significant advances, I would say, in the last 10 years or so. A lot of it is because of advancements of capacity for computing to be able to deal with very large amounts of data,” Mobasher said. “Some of these deep learning models that allow people to create deep fakes, for example, or generate art or generate music and things like that, are based on huge amounts of data that has been sort of learned through these large models.” 

Public knowledge of AI has skyrocketed in the last decade. Fans of Jeopardy might recall the moment back in 2011 when Watson, an IBM supercomputer running AI software, beat Ken Jennings, a contestant who famously won 74 games in a row. 

In response to his defeat, Jennings wrote, “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.” 

Academic Integrity

In many college classrooms, AI is being discussed for different reasons – plagiarism, fear and when it is applicable to use in the field. Robert Karpinski, DePaul’s associate vice president for academic affairs, made the following statement regarding the use of ChatGPT in the classroom: 

“After discussion with our Office of General Counsel, the unauthorized use of ChatGPT or something similar would fall under the sections of the Academic Integrity Policy that refers to, ‘Any use of words, ideas, or other work products attributed to an identifiable source, without attributing the work to the source from which it was obtained, in a situation where there is a legitimate expectation of original authorship.’”

The technology is so new that some DePaul faculty members do not yet know how students can effectively use ChatGPT on assignments with integrity. The program does not attribute anything it says to sources, and developers even warn that “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”

Journalism professor Chris Bury said he does not want students using ChatGPT to write their stories in a field that revolves around human experience and attribution. 

“I think I will be more careful about checking sources because plagiarism is going to be a huge problem,” Bury said. “I think that this is another case where the technology is way ahead of the law.” 

Marketing professor James Moore said he foresees AI being an important tool for business students.

“There is no one-size-fits-all policy for use of AI,” Moore said. “Some disciplines will actively want students to use large language models tools in assignments, such as digital marketing… Other disciplines may not want LLM tools to be used at all.”

The International Baccalaureate program (IB) announced  it will allow students to use ChatGPT on essays. The students who choose to use ChatGPT as a tool must acknowledge when they are using AI. 

Creative writing students like DePaul sophomore Brigid O’Brien are trying their best to stay optimistic.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people who were like, ‘I’m writing a novel. I have the first chapter down, but I don’t know how to write the second chapter so I’m just going to let AI do its thing and see what happens,’” O’Brien said. “And just plug in that this character is doing x, y and z, and then taking that and give it up a little bit so that you have a book written by AI and then the rest is human. But because I want a job, I’m gonna have the benefit of the doubt and say that’s not gonna happen, even though it probably will.”

Header Illustration by Julia Hester