On Sep. 3, President Ambar sent out a statement concerning the rise of artificial intelligence and its potential impacts on liberal arts education. This week, the Opinion Editors sought out students to ask about President Ambar’s proposed initiative.
These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Do you use artificial intelligence to help with your studies and school work?
Clarady Brooks, College third-year:
I haven’t used AI recently. I think some people consider Google Translate to be AI, and I see the AI overview on Google, but I’m trying to scroll past it. Over the summer and the school year, I’ve been more intentional about trying not to use it.
Isabel Handa, College fourth-year:
I try not to use AI as much as I can. One, because it’s just never something I did before. So I figured I would just go about not using it. But then I also heard that it used up a lot of water. So I was like, “maybe I should just try not to use it in general and just keep doing what I’m doing.” I know a ton of people who use it for notes and reading stuff.
Dung Le, College fourth-year:
I often use it to summarize readings. Sometimes to paraphrase, for example, a discussion post. I use it very often to look up a term or a number.
Amira Kim, College fourth-year:
I don’t really use AI that much. I have used it to summarize a reading before, but that’s it.
What are your feelings surrounding AI? Do you think the College should be more strict or loose with regulating students’ use?
Shay Cohen-Jones, College third-year:
I am very concerned about the effect that generative AI has on our ability to hone our critical thinking skills and produce original work. As a campus of artists, writers, and people who care deeply about critical thinking, it feels important to me to preserve my original analysis and use my own brain to analyze the things we’re talking about in class.
Tommy Berlack, College third-year:
I think it really depends. There are certain departments and majors where I think using AI is important for those students to be able to get jobs after they leave here. To be a computer science kid right now, it’s gotta really suck. But then I think about an English class or something, and AI doesn’t really seem necessary. So I think if the school were to come up with something, it would really have to stay with the way as it is right now, where it’s essentially in the professor’s hands.
Dung Le, College fourth-year:
The school should encourage students to question why they use AI and if there is a legitimate reason. The school should reemphasize that they come here paying tuition to study and to thrive academically, not to have a chat-bot think for them. So, whether strict or lenient, the College’s rules should get students to think about that question.
Sydney Banks, College fourth-year:
At first, people were extremely combative against AI. I think that now that we’re seeing people realize that AI could be a useful tool, it’s starting to become very gradually and slowly incorporated into different spaces. And I think that’s dangerous. I think that it’s extremely normalized to use AI now for a bunch of different things. There are some people who are using it for therapy reasons, and it’s becoming a lot, and I try my best to steer clear of it, just because I want to continue to be able to think on my own and be a good writer on my own. But I think to some extent, it can be a useful starting point, but I do think that people are going overboard in using it.
Amira Kim, College fourth-year:
I think that using AI takes away from my education. At the same time, it will be a big part of the future and the industries that I am interested in going into, so I don’t know. I work in the Writing Center, and we talk about AI and academic integrity a lot. We value writing and collaborative discourse between humans rather than with computers. I do think that there are undeniable positive uses with AI and that it will be unavoidable in the future. There is value in doing the work to integrate Oberlin with the technology now rather than later, but I personally don’t use it. I really avoid using it as a student, because I pay a lot of money to go to the school and to learn things by myself. I don’t really know exactly how the school should navigate what the role of AI is in our education.
What do you think about the environmental impact of artificial intelligence?
Leila Ismail, College third-year:
Generative AI chat-bots and the way they are currently being used are fundamentally immoral. As an Africana Studies major, my whole discipline considers the ways in which these sorts of technologies that are being developed are impacting BIPOC. I know that Grok is a huge contributor to environmental racism. Places all over the country, especially places in the Midwest, are being ravaged for the fresh water that these sorts of devices sort of need to function. Where is the line? I understand that, realistically, AI will continue becoming the norm. But I think Oberlin as an institution, which prides itself on being carbon neutral, should really consider the environmental and human consequences that this sort of material is causing and encourage students to stay away from using it.
Shay Cohen-Jones, College third-year:
As we plunge deeper into interconnected global crises like the environmental crisis and the genocide [in Gaza], it is clear that AI is not a politically neutral tool. It is true that AI is deeply embedding itself in many aspects of our lives already, but that doesn’t mean we need to dig ourselves a deeper hole. Gemini AI, for example, is deeply, deeply implicated in the genocide of Palestinians [which is contributing to carbon emissions]. And the data centers that AI depends on to run are siphoning massive amounts of water and disproportionately impacting primarily Black and working-class communities. The College’s decision to prioritize engagement over taking a moral stand is political.
Tommy Berlack, College third-year:
[The environmental impact] is the most surprising thing about the initiative. The school just spent millions of dollars to make our campus carbon neutral. Now, we’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on premium versions of AI chatbots which are probably going to produce just as many issues for the climate than the school would have without the carbon neutrality initiative. It’s unfortunate. I do understand the need to be ahead of the curve. It’s definitely a tricky area.
What is your reaction to the initiative? What more information would you want the President’s Office to provide students?
Leila Ismail, College third-year:
It’s similar to how the Young Democratic Socialists of America have been advocating for general transparency from the College’s administration. At minimum, I want to see the College discuss the details of their initiative in a document and recognize environmental and human harm that these technologies are causing. I want complete transparency on both the conceptual lines on why President Ambar’s office is thinking about this.
Tommy Berlack, College third-year:
I think the main thing for me at the end of the day is that a liberal arts education is all about what students want to do, but at the same time, we also have to remember the professors and all the teaching staff at this school. And academic freedom is just as important as it is for us students as it is to them. My hope is that no one’s job is put under threat due to whatever the school, students, or other staff may want to do with AI. At the end of the day, that’s the value of an institution like Oberlin — investing in really good staff to teach us, not robots and artificial intelligence.
Shay Cohen-Jones, College third-year:
I’m interested to see how this pans out, but based on the statement that President Ambar put out, I am absolutely concerned about what seems to be an embrace of AI that is largely lacking a material stance on its global and domestic impacts as well. President Ambar seems to be prioritizing engagement that contributes materially to global ecocide. And that deeply, deeply concerns me.
