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AI for College Students

Why Can't I Use AI to Do All My Coursework?

Students often think "Why can't I use AI to do all of my coursework?" 

It is true that AI is capable of completing many of your assignments. However, there are many reasons for you to do the work yourself. Two major reasons are:

  1. While the content of a college education is important, an equally important component is learning how to think. By doing your school work, you are using your mind to reason through problems. These reasoning and thinking skills will stay with you throughout your life.
  2. You are right, AI can come up with an answer, and a future employer might want you to use AI to do work. But, the employer didn't hire you to enter prompts into AI. They hired you for your skill in analyzing the responses from AI. Is the answer correct, does it satisfy your need? If all you know is how to enter a prompt into AI, you won't be worth much to your employer. You need the subject background to be able to query AI and use its responses effectively. You are learning that subject background here at college. If you use AI now, and don't learn what your professors are trying to teach you, you will not be of value to an employer.

The Major Players in Generative AI

How AI is Trained

Watch an A.I. Learn to Write by Reading Nothing but... An article from the New York Times explaining how AI is trained.

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Prompt Generation

Prompt generation gets a lot of attention, some say it is of critical importance, others say it's not that important, just experiment with AI and you will get the hang of it. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Research has found that prompts with more detail tend to get better results. It is also helpful to tell the AI what it is (you are a college professor designing an introduction to philosophy course, you work for a company that designs innovative and engaging apps...) The more specific you can get, the more the AI has to work with

Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School, and his team have developed prompts that may be helpful in the higher education world:

Anthropic, the company that created Claude, an AI similar to Copilot and Google Gemini, has created a library of prompts. You can browse through it to get ideas of what AI can do.

Prompt Crafting Resources