Rice vs. ChatGPT

Spring 2024
By Hilary C. Ritz

In fall 2023, the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies presented a series of courses taught by Rice faculty titled Generative Artificial Intelligence and Humanity. Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can produce original responses to user prompts on a wide variety of topics. The classes covered the potential impact of these tools on health care, music, philosophy and ethics, democracy, and more. We were curious to know what Rice professors thought about the use of generative AI in the classroom. Here’s what a few of them had to say.

Elizabeth Petrick 
Department of History
School of Humanities

One big shift is that, in both of my classes this semester, I’m bringing ChatGPT into the class discussions.  I also developed an assignment for the students asking them to use ChatGPT. It’s a little experimental, so we’ll see how it goes. I’ve also transitioned some of my classes to use in-class midterms instead of short-essay assignments; now I’m trying to transition my other classes as well, the ones that I’ve never had in-class midterms in. And I will say, I have colleagues who I know have made similar decisions to do more in-class work, and then you just don’t even have to worry about things like ChatGPT.

Robert J. Howell 
Chair, Department of Philosophy 
School of Humanities

When your history teacher asks you to write a paper about the origins of the Civil War, if you just have ChatGPT write it, you’re obviously misrepresenting something, but you’re also failing to do something: You’re failing to recognize what happens when a group of people have a certain set of beliefs and won’t let go of them, how hate can lead to fear, and how fear can lead to mass death. By writing a paper, you’re going to have to take all these bits of evidence into account, weigh them and figure out how to  articulate them correctly. That’s a  process of character building. Your  history teachers want you to write a  paper because of what you undergo when you’re writing that paper. To the degree that we defer to ChatGPT in order to have this done for us, we’re actually forgoing a major part of our character formation.

Rodrigo Ferreira 
Computer Science
George R. Brown School of Engineering

I teach ethics in computer science. I tell [my students], these tools, generative AI, are there and they’re always available for you, and you can always use them. And there will be no way that I will know if you’re using them to bypass an assignment or to submit something that isn’t really your own. And I have no interest in chasing down whether or not this text that you submitted, you wrote or not, or of making any accusations in that regard. I’m offering you a chance here to use this time and this space to learn about things that you care about, and to commit yourself to learning about the social and ethical impacts of these technologies, rather than just blindly using them to meet whatever is the next immediate objective in your academic or professional career.