'I am terrified,' How 2 Sudbury, Ont. college instructors area dealing with AI in the classroom

When Nathan Abourbih thinks about ChatGPT and the future of artificial intelligence (AI) he says it keeps him up at night.

"I am terrified," he said.

"Because I know where it's going, it terrifies me."

Abourbih teaches in the IT Business Analysis program at Cambrian College in Sudbury, Ont.

He and his colleague Jessica Joy recently held a workshop with other Cambrian faculty members about AI and how it should be used in the classroom

While Abourbih said the future of AI terrifies him, he has used the technology in the classroom and encourages his students to engage with AI language models like the popular ChatGPT.

"I'm encouraging them to use it if they need it," he said.

"However, I require them to describe to me how they used it and the process they went through when they did use it."

Abourbih said his biggest concern about AI is the quality of the content it produces.

"If we take a piece of paper and we put it through the photocopier, and then we photocopy it again, and then we photocopy it again, and again, and again, it gets a little worse every time," he said.

Abourbih said language models like ChatGPT work the same way. Their answers are only as good as the training data they receive. If the input is wrong, then the output will also be incorrect. If AI is publishing content with wrong information, that feeds into the system and trains the next generation of AI.

But despite those concerns, he said the technology is unavoidable. And students will use it whether he likes it or not.

Companies like Microsoft, which owns a large stake in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, will continue to implement AI into products like the Bing search engine and Microsoft 365, which includes Office, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

"It'll be built into the tool, so we can't really hide from it," Abourbih said.

His colleague Joy has avoided using AI in the classroom, so far. But she said that will be more difficult to do in the future.

As the use of AI in education becomes unavoidable, Joy said educators need some direction and policies and how to deal with the technology. But teachers are often left to their own devices.

"There seems to be a lack of consistency," she said.

"So a lot of us are confused. And in the absence of institutional policies, faculty are developing their own or just ignoring the issue."

Joy said she and Abourbih hosted the workshop with their colleagues to make it clear AI isn't the latest trend that will disappear in a year.

"I think we're both on agreement on the fact that it's not going anywhere," she said.

"So how do we move forward understanding that?"