How MSU Denver navigates cheating versus intention and transformation
At MSU Denver, a tenured faculty, an administrator and a librarian have differing perspectives on the use of AI in higher education.
In Jessica L Parker’s research and argument writing class, essays generated by the artificial intelligence tool by Microsoft, Copilot, were graded by students and “universally got an F, because it was bad,” Parker said. The tool, Copilot, is part of a technological mob — large-language models used as AI assistants.
Internet traffic in 2022, the year in which OpenAI first released ChatGPT publicly, was 600% larger in total bytes than internet traffic in 2015, according to the International Energy Agency.
The Metropolitan spoke with Parker — also known by students as “Dr. J” — about the effect of AI on her and her students.
“I don’t see, in an educational setting, a one size fits all approach being appropriate, because there are real disciplinary differences,” she said. In Parker’s experience, the number of students using AI tools for classwork is “fewer than most probably think.”
The English professor, who describes herself as a “curious skeptic,” believes people should understand AI as a tool.
“Before you make judgments about the tools, understand how they work and what they can and can’t do. They are not magic, although they look like magic when they produce something that looks really amazing, really quickly. But they’re not magic, they’re a tool, and like any tool, they can be used for good or for ill.”
She said it’s too early to know what the effects of AI will be on higher education at MSU Denver, on Auraria Campus and elsewhere. She believes those impacts will be determined by those who use it, and how it is used. In Parker’s view, ideally, the government would provide some regulation, but she also said that seemed unlikely.
“The institutions: higher ed, individual institutions, and then higher ed as a whole — needs to put some guardrails in place about what’s appropriate, instead of just saying ‘Students will need to use this in the workforce, let’s embrace it.’” Parker continued, “That’s, in my view, not very responsible.” She also mentioned the environmental and ethical costs of AI.
In 2023, Wim Vanderbauwhede, a professor at the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow analyzed ChatGPT versus traditional Google search for energy use and emissions. He wrote online, “Contrary to popular belief, it is the use of ChatGPT, not its training, that dominates emissions.”
He estimated replacing traditional Google searches with ChatGPT chat-assisted searches would increase the emissions of search by 60 times — a massive environmental cost within our planet’s limited remaining carbon budget
With a different perspective, Samuel Jay wears three hats on Auraria Campus: one as the executive director of Emerging Technology and Academic Transformation.
His role exists due to the creation of MSU Denver’s Generative AI taskforce, which he chairs. He said he encourages faculty use of AI to make course content more fluid and to enrich both teaching and learning experiences.
The director argued that AI can “lower hurdles” and “shorten the runway” for students to get to the jobs or careers they’re studying for, and stresses the ethical and responsible use of these tools as paramount.
Describing his stance as “excited”, Jay himself uses Copilot in one of his classes as a “secondary instructor,” one that he claims gets his students to engage with the reading material more critically. He then uses backend data to tailor lectures around his students’ needs, mapping what his students are asking AI to his pedagogy.
The instructor believes the experience of faculty can’t be replaced by AI and that the human relationships between professor and student are still critical.
Jay believes that, “The genie is out of the bottle, we’re not returning to a world where having the literacy and the capacity to understand how to use generative AI is going away.”
He also cautioned, “I want students to understand, yes, if you’re just using the steps of a shortcut to produce assignments, you’re not doing yourself any good. It’s cheating. ‘Cheating’ is a very strong term, but, if you’re actually interested in learning the content of that class, then you need to be using a generative AI artificial intelligence as a thought partner, as opposed to just a content generator.”
Eric Baker, a librarian at the tri-institutional Auraria Library, describes himself as “agnostic” about the tools.
This semester, he has noticed an increase in their use on campus, as well as “higher level interest and more sustained questioning” regarding their utility. Baker described “two areas” of usage for these tools in academia— writing and research.
He described a “transformative power of education and exploration” and said “I would argue that the true and secret purpose of higher education is not job skills. I would posit it’s to form people who know how to think more carefully.” He continued, “If you have a machine that’s doing part of that work, the unethical part is you’re cheating. You’re cheating yourself.” Finally, Baker warned, “When I think about the long-term menace of AI, it’s the same sort of long-term menaces we already see, when institutional bureaucracies seek to use information to exercise power.”
From their point of view, even with AI, intention and thought still matter at Auraria.
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