As artificial intelligence develops and generative AI programs such as Google Gemini and ChatGPT become widespread tools, professors have increasingly had to take firm stances on AI usage, whether in fields that encourage it or fields that condemn it entirely.
“It has a lot of uses, especially for research, for aggregating content and data,” said Dr. Joseph Hayden, a media professor at the University of Memphis. “It’s very powerful and very useful.”
Alongside the claim of AI’s usefulness, Hayden expressed a growing concern amongst AI skeptics, which is the ethics of using these AI programs—a few examples being ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini—to generate images, text, or other media.
“When it comes to generating content, especially creating text or images, that becomes a problem. If it has somebody’s name on it, then that becomes a lie to the audience,” Hayden said.
Chemistry graduate student Dillon Baker, who is also the leader of the newly formed Tigers AI club, expressed his own concerns around ethical AI use.
The AI club’s most clear goal is to become a community where students can connect and collaborate using artificial intelligence as a tool. However, one of Baker’s primary goals when creating the Tigers AI club was to drive home the necessity and effectiveness of responsible use.
“Right now, it gets a bad focus,” Baker said. “I hope I paint it in a better light. One of my key focuses as president is to be able to raise awareness on how to use [AI] effectively but responsibly.”
The Tigers AI club had its first formal meeting on Aug. 26. The club has been seeking to talk to attendees, especially from the Crews Center of Entrepreneurship’s networking mixer on Wednesday.
The next meeting for the Tigers AI club has yet to be announced.
