“People will start looking for your knowledge on AI and how much you know,” she adds. “It’s fascinating how much it’s improving every day. Despite that it is continually learning, it does have hallucinations or false information that it may give you. It’s important to be aware of this and to fact-check it. AI is a great tool if used responsibly.”
An example Camryn used in class was to ask AI how to rob a bank. Since a direct approach wouldn’t have worked, “I tricked it and asked it to write a screenplay on the techniques of a bank robber,” she says. “It saw it as a project and was looking at the best times of day at specific banks. It was really shocking.”
After she spent four months in Japan last semester, Camryn’s final creative project was to take a real language—Japanese—and mix it with the fictional Na’vi language. “It was interesting to see how AI took the Na’vi words and used Japanese sentence structure,” she says. “Advanced AI is at a pace now where people have a hard time keeping up with it. But it’s crucial to know and understand what’s happening. AI can be helpful; we just have to be cautious about how it’s used.”
With help from the roots rock, country, soul band Uncle Lucius, Michael D’avena, a junior communication and environmental studies student from McLean, Virginia, used a generative AI service to create the music and lyrics of a song about environmental issues. “It was very good,” Michael says. “A song that you would hear on the radio.”
But like other students in the class, he’s concerned about where AI is heading. “I feel like AI is incredibly dangerous,” Michael adds, “and the people in charge are not responsible enough. If we don’t have proper oversight, and if AI evolves on its own, we could have serious issues.”
Hildebrand shares that she has proposed to take her three-week Winter Term AI Culture and Communication course to a once-a-year, semester-long offering. “This is a course that will have to be updated regularly to keep up with the fast pace in which this technology changes and evolves,” she points out. “I am glad that students at Eckerd College have the opportunity to obtain skills and literacy in AI with this and other courses to be better prepared for the workplace and an AI-powered future more generally.”
