Santa Rosa Junior College English instructor Jake Aharonian encouraged students to question the future of artificial intelligence with a Free Press video presentation Oct. 29 at Newman Auditorium.
Aharonian has taught English classes at SRJC since 2009 and hosted this event in hopes that students would question and experience differing perspectives of AI. Aharonian presented a video from the Free Press Debate YouTube series, “Will AI Save Us — or Destroy Us?”, which follows a series of live debates on a multitude of topics.
Journalist and author Nicholas Carr and computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier spoke at the debate, arguing that the truth would not survive AI.
In the Free Press Debate video, Carr described the truth as a social ideal.
“To get down into the future of truth, one has to look at the technology of AI and how it will influence society, social norms and cultural norms,” he said.
Lanier used the Turing Test, an experiment that questioned if a machine could show intelligence similar to that of a human, to stress that people are easy to fool and that AI can take advantage of that.
“There’s this dismal feeling that we’re headed into this brick wall where nothing makes sense,” Lanier said.
Aravind Srinivas, CEO and co-founder of Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, and Fei-Fei Li, Stanford professor and co-director of the university’s AI institute, took the other side of the debate, arguing that AI will help us see the world more clearly and that the truth will survive AI.
Srinivas described AI as a superpower that people have to channel, and that technology comes from people’s curiosity to seek truth and find solutions to problems.
Li challenged Carr’s debate in the Free Press Debate video, with two anecdotes: her toddler asking her a question about Pokémon she couldn’t answer, and worrying about receiving a call that her immigrant parents had fallen while she was away. She used AI for both instances.
“In this human-centered framework, AI is not a foe but a friend. If we choose to make it a friend, it doesn’t replace us, it augments us. It doesn’t seek or not seek truth — people do, using AI,” Li said.
The event was part of SRJC’s English department’s Work of Literary Merit , an annual event in which the department chooses a work or text to introduce students to and to incorporate into class discussions. This year’s work of literary fiction was “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley.
Aharonian said that while the discussion of AI is not related to Huxley’s “Brave New World,” it is still part of the new expectation of future thinking.
Aharonian is not opposed to using AI in his classes to process thoughts or coalesce information, but is against students using it to write their work.
“If I suspect the use of AI or ChatGPT, I’ll run it through three different detector sites,” Aharonian said. “And if the average percentage of AI-generated content is 60% or higher, then it’ll be a failing grade on that essay.”
He worries that while AI can be helpful, its increased ability to do human tasks will rob people of their capability to come up with their own ideas or creations.
Along with the Free Press debate, SRJC English instructor Karen Walker will host “Somatized: Brave New World & an Anxious Generation,” at 5 p.m. Nov. 5 in Newman Auditorium, and Aharonian will host “Worldview and Speculative Fiction” at noon Nov. 19 in Newman Auditorium.
