For the essay and image of a historical figure/event, I chose to use Copilot from the UMW AI tools, and also chose Malcolm X as my historical figure to plug in. The AI generated a quite realistic image of Malcolm X during his prime, but the essay was lackluster. It was repetitive with its wording and even some of its talking points. It also painted him as less of a controversial figure than he was during his time, stating that “even those who disagreed with him recognized his intellectual force and rhetorical mastery,” which was not at all the case when he was alive. For me personally, this reinforced my opinions about the usage of AI in both general use and its use in educational fields. As a creative writing student who is very passionate about his art, the idea of giving a machine the ability to generate art at a faster pace than a human is terrifying. It eliminates the need for creative arts and the humanities in most fields, and is causing younger people to not engage with creative endeavors, such as music, art, and writing. Art is the act of putting emotions into something tangible. Machines do not have those emotions, and therefore should not be given the ability to create art. It will not have the same feeling as something created by a human. Because of the rise of AI’s generative abilities, students are using them to create essays within seconds, not realizing that these tools are not all-knowing databases and have limited access to the internet. I do not think that AI should be the tool we use to do our homework for us.
For the transcription of the cemetery documents, I used Google Gemini. It was very good at transcribing, focusing on very specific details and even putting them into an actual table similar to the one on the document I uploaded. It also labeled key notations, such as references to the Veteran Reserve Corps and what the red ink on the page likely meant. This, in my opinion, is what AI should be used for. Its greatest skill is pattern recognition, which is what educational services should use it for. AI should be used to work on the tedious things we shouldn’t have to worry about, so that then block us from being able to do the things we need/want to do.