Julie Schell, Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Technology, thinks of AI as having two kinds of use: transactional and transformative, and whether its use is good or bad in either case depends on the situation. “There are times it’s okay to use it as a transactional tool: ‘I need a list of ideas for planning dinner for the week,’ or ‘I need a list of ideas for a meeting coming up,’ or ‘Help me brainstorm research ideas.’ Those are low-stakes transactions, and we need to help students understand when transactional use is OK.” But in this transactional category, she once experimented with using AI to write letters of recommendation, something that can be a time-consuming task for those in academia. “When I read what it said, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t me. It didn’t have the flavor of how I really thought about the student, and I didn’t think it was fair to my student for me to use that output,” she says.
