In speaking with MPR News, Thomas Feeney, an associate professor of philosophy and the director of the Master of Arts in Artificial Intelligence Leadership Program at the University of St. Thomas, discussed how colleges must prepare students not just to use AI tools, but to understand their broader implications.
From the interview:
“I had an interesting experience over the summer teaching an AI ethics class. You know plagiarism would be an interesting question in an AI ethics class … They had permission to use AI for the first written assignment. And it was clear that many of them had just fed in the prompt, gotten back the paper and uploaded that. But rather than initiate a sort of disciplinary oppositional setting, I tried to show them, look, what you what you've produced is kind of generic … and this gave the students a chance to recognize that they weren’t there in their own work. This opened the floodgates,” Feeney said.
“I think the focus should be less on learning how to work with the interfaces we have right now and more on just graduate with a story about how you did something with AI that you couldn’t have done without it. And then, crucially, how you shared it with someone else,” he continued.
