It’s impossible to drive to San Francisco without being bombarded by billboard advertisements for the latest and greatest developments in artificial intelligence.
Despite or perhaps because I grew up in Silicon Valley, I’m skeptical of new technology’s promises to subvert the status quo. I didn’t own a smartphone until my junior year of high school, and I only downloaded ChatGPT last August when my boss at the Writing Center asked if AI would be a worthwhile investment to use in tutoring. But tech’s existence is unavoidable.
Human discernment is needed not only to navigate AI but accurately situate machine generated insights in presented work.
The newest form of AI being advertised to students is Google’s product NotebookLM, launched in 2023. USF computer science professor David Wolber described NotebookLM as “a Google tool for building chatbots, study guides, and podcasts,” in an email to the Foghorn. “You can upload any documents into a notebook – the readings for a course, a pdf of a book, the URLs regarding your major, and it instantly creates a chatbot and study guides for you. You can also instruct it to create a podcast.” The tool expedites studying by making instant summaries and citations, materials students used to have to make for themselves in order to process the content.
The USF Honor Code does not have an official stance on AI usage other than disallowing “the act of presenting, as one’s own, the ideas or writings of another,” which applies to using anything other than one’s own original work in academics.
Some teachers have decided to confront the ethical ambiguity of AI with neither enthusiasm nor moderation but flat rejection of technology in the classroom, permitting only pen-and-paper completion of assignments from notetaking to exams.
“The range of faculty opinion is just as wide as can possibly be,” said Jonathan Hunt, a rhetoric professor and the former chair of the academic integrity committee.
Wolber said, “If you need a study guide for a class, or want to understand an article but would rather listen to a podcast than read, check out NotebookLM. And let USF ITS know you want them to turn on NotebookLM Plus!”
Journalism professor Tim Redmond is more cautious about embracing the technology. “I think there are tools like NotebookLM that can be useful tools for journalists in researching and collecting data. I do not think they are appropriate tools to be used for presenting data,” he said.
Artificial intelligence, including NotebookLM, will find its place in education whether we like it or not, as surely as fast-casual restaurants have found a market in American food culture and fast-casual dating has replaced real relationships. In a society where convenience is king, this is inevitable.
NotebookLM is to education what the Instant Pot is to home cooking — an impressive shortcutting piece of machinery capable of decent cuisine, but nowhere close to replicating the subtle art of old school cooking. It can produce respectable substitutes, but a depth of flavor is perceptibly lost in the time, love and care traded out.
However, I don’t want a respectable substitute. I want something special. As a literature major, I want to be comfortable working directly with texts. I chose USF specifically so I would have the opportunity to be mentored directly by passionate professors, not a TA, and definitely not AI. I have every intention to make full use of this opportunity. NotebookLM is not part of that ideal.
In the future, I might use AI to streamline work. But at the moment, I’m a student who is still learning the ropes of writing well. I want my skills to be solid before I try breaking any rules.
Editor-in-Chief: Jordan Premmer, Chief Copy Editor: Sophia McCrackin, Managing Editor: Jordan DelFiugo, Opinion Editor: Dakota Duran, Scene Editor: Elina Graham
