At the beginning of this semester I decided to make a small change to the masthead. Next to the editorial, the masthead features the staff of The Record, as well as a few other bits of information. 

I added the line “The Record is made without the use of A.I.”

It felt important. We live in a world where A.I. is being used for more, and getting better every single day. Over the past 18 months, A.I. has hurtled forward at breakneck pace. 

I remember first playing with A.I. as a first-year. I signed myself up for a beta version of OpenAI’s GPT-3, and I distinctly remember my friends and I messing around with it. 

At the time, it was rough around the edges. GPT-3 struggled to tell longer stories, often getting stuck in loops or creating narratives that had absolutely no throughline,  with story beats that came out of nowhere. It was better (still not great) at shorter things, like pickup lines or top-ten lists. 

I lost interest in it pretty quickly — it was a fun party trick, but nothing more. Turning in a text generated by this A.I. would not have resulted in a passing grade in your English class. 

Obviously, we all know the rest of this story: A.I. improves rapidly over the next couple of years to where it is today, which is damaging and does way more harm than good. 

Using A.I. to replace humans is morally wrong. Humans work hard to gain skills as authors, designers, photographers. To replace a human with A.I. in an effort to save a few bucks is deplorable. Hire a copywriter and coder for your website. Hire a graphic designer, or just learn how to do it yourself. 

Beyond that, I believe that a large part of what we like about art is the human element, both in the life experiences that lead people to create art and the small imperfections that come from things made by humans and not machines. 

Every time you find a typo in The Record, consider that evidence that a group of people got together to create something for the love of the game — proof that I didn’t enter a handful of prompts into whatever language learning model is hot right now and hand that out to the student body. 

According to an article from MIT News, data centers, which are being built at a much-increased pace to match the need from A.I., are projected to consume enough electricity in 2026 to rank 5th on a list of all countries globally, between Japan and Russia. From an environmental standpoint, how can we possibly justify this?

I don’t use A.I. in my writing. We don’t use it with The Record, not even to generate headlines or check for style. I will never knowingly display art or wear a shirt with an A.I. design on it. 

But as it gets better, that gets harder. In a PR class I took with Anna Groff, she asked us to use A.I. in an element of our press release, and write about how we used it. I didn’t, and wrote about why. Anna ran all our releases through Turnitin’s A.I. checker, and it said that 46% of my work had likely been generated by A.I. On the flip side, the people who did use A.I. breezed past the detector, turning up zeros. 

It’s the Wild West, and it may be a while until we have a better handle on how to use this tool. Or, we may never figure it out. 

In the meantime, I will continue to write my own articles, throw my friends a few bucks to design something for me, or try and make it myself, even if it’s not as “polished” as A.I. could do it.