With the increasing popularity of generative AI softwares such as ChatGPT and CoPilot, this has been a looming question. But professionals are looking to understand how to use AI, and what are the ethical repercussions of its use.
Some experts say there are ideal ways to incorporate the tech assistant in to your work and others that simply the use of it in general is unethical. In this exploration, we seek to understand what it means for students in universities as well as emerging and current communication professionals.
Caption: AI strategist, Rebecca Bultsma. Photo Supplied by: Rebecca Bultsma.
Rebecca Bultsma, an ethical AI strategist, believes in the stuffed oreo analogy when using AI. This is when the beginning, 20%, of your work is done by AI, this would be the brainstorming and planning, then would be the 60%, which is the human work, the final 20% would also be done by AI, which would be the polishing, editing and revision of the work.
“The stuffed oreo is a really good visual for how I think we should be using AI, at least in a work or communications context,” said Bultsma, “in that way I think AI is an excellent collaborator, as long as the focus remains on that white part that needs to be human.”
There is a lot of fear and uncertainty on the side of educators as they navigate the use of AI in higher education institutions. For years, written work has been used as a metric for how well a student understands a topic. Bultsma explains why this is no longer going to work, as the days of staring at a blank page are long gone.
“Teachers and experts have tried to identify AI generated writing in a study, and the truth is they just can’t. The solution is not AI detectors because they’re notoriously unreliable, the reality is we have simply outgrown policing the use of AI in education,” she said.
A study shows that more and more workplaces are looking to hire individuals that have AI skills. Bultsma says that a reimagining of education is needed to fill the gap between rejecting AI and partnering with it in a way that benefits us.
Conversely, MRU assistant professor, Crystal Chokshi, encourages starting with a blank page. She believes that the the use of generative AI in schools and universities acts as a crutch for teaching students how to think.
“I know that can sound little bit alarmist, or harken back to moral panics about previous technologies, but really writing is about thinking and generation is about thinking and so I’m a wholehearted advocate for sitting with the blank page and thinking,” Chokshi said.
Caption: Public relations, assistant professor, Crystal Chokshi, PhD. Photo supplied by: Crystal Chokshi.
With the constant pressure to produce more as communication professionals, Chokshi explains that these technologies have been marketed in a way that claims they remove the grunt work, when in reality they only end up adding to the work load.
“The promise that technologies have sold us for years of making life better, doesn’t really hold. They just make us work in different ways, faster… I think as communicators we need to be mindful of that, in terms of our own sanity. All this acceleration, to what end?” she asks.
The loss of human touch, which is the cornerstone of communications professionals work, is also a negative aspect of the use of generative AI. Chokshi warns that we’re moving towards a world where the generation and consumption of our information and knowledge will be machine generated,
“Communications and public relations are about forging relationships. There is nothing relational about machine-generated language,” she said.
AI’s impact on marginalised communities and the environment are also overlooked. Training AI is often outsourced to minoritized, non-white groups in the global south. These groups go though varying degrees of graphic content ranging from sexual abuse to violence, ultimately to train artificial intelligence. And with AI also using immense amounts of water and electricity to operate, Chokshi warns that while we use AI, we may be losing sight of our humanity.
“One of the questions that I want to ask of people in the communications profession is how far do our commitments to EDI extend? Is it just the people in our local community or are we willing to think about relationality across the globe? ” She asks, “for some reason, over and over, we choose acceleration, convenience, optimization, efficiency over the health of our planet.”
As we look ahead it’s important to look at both sides. What Bultsma and Chokshi’s insights both have to offer are the different ways generative AI impacts the life of students as well as the work of emerging and current communication professionals. Although AI may help us jumpstart our work we should keep in mind the ethical implications that it can have on our environment and poor geo-political areas in the world.
