My Personal Relationship to AI

 What is your personal relationship to AI? How do the arguments of Ferlazzo or Galland & Rettinger feel to you?  Do they resonate with you? Alienate you? Scare you? Excite you?

I cant lie, my relationship with AI is unique to say the least. On one hand, I understand the accessibility and ease that it is able to provide at our fingertips for tasks that feel minor. In my personal life, I use AI primarily for flushing out ideas and unclear thoughts in hopes of connecting resources externally. For example, I have began to think about potential ideas for my capstone for my Masters, building a profile through ChatGPT engagement and using references to career interests and academic background to generate depth into potential outcomes for my capstone project. To my surprise, the initial idea that I had came up with on my own, was not an idea that ChatGPT was able to generate. This correlates with Ferlazzo in AI Can Save Teachers Time and Stress, when they mentioned using AI to create several lesson plans for their classroom and them all following a similar template. Ferlazzo concluded that AI did not have the ability to be creative. Ironically enough, today in class when working in our groups on the poem assignment as we working to generate an AI image for our graphic we discussed amongst ourselves the lack of originality in the AI generated images that are all over social media. Whether it be a sports related graphic, an advertisement for a local food entrepreneur, or even some images tied to large corporations all share similar fonts, formats and the same "Artificial Imagery" as I call it. Personally, I struggle with not only the lack of originality that AI provides, but also the moral and ethical impacts behind AI are also a challenge to deal with. Data Centers and AI moderators testing have been known to directly impact underresourced communities internationally and domestically and many of the AI moderators and testers are underpaid, minorities who are enduring some potentially harmful physical and emotional conditions in these positions I have learned in my prior YDEV course with Dr. Benson.

Overall, the arguments of Ferlazzo excite me as they do provide me strategy for how to utilize AI while being able to still have my own personal touch in my work. The idea of AI providing a rough draft, or using AI as a brainstorm for ideas and then taking that bare base and "MJ-fying" the finished product. In my work in Academic Advising, we are aware that AI is coming to campus in new innovative ways and we are working to incorporate AI hopefully for clerical and administrative tasks, which in theory should provide more opportunity for myself and our team of advisors to be more present in our work and interactions with students. I am excited, curious, and ambitious to see how AI and I can work in tandem going forward, as it is apparent that AI is not going anywhere.

Digital Native Response

After reading Spiegel's revisit to Presnky's "digital native" article, Spiegel provides some necessary pushback to the ideologies of Presnky. In my interpretation, a portion of this can be attributed to the timing of the initial article and the timing of the revisit. Spiegel mentions reading the article in 2002, a year after it was published in 2001; 20 years prior to the revisit that we are discussing today. With that change in time, language such as "native" and "immigrant" can become outdated and leave room for misinterpretation. These 2 terms also put a hyperfocus and false confidence in the "native" to be an expert and that there is not much to be learned from the "immigrant" but more to teach. 

I really was compelled by the mention of Danah Boyd's research that found that youth are not tied to their phones because they love gadgets, but more so the private community and safe space they are able to comfortably inhibit through their phones and digital spaces. This is especially eye-opening for me as someone who feels like I was able to navigate my childhood as both a "native" to it but also an "immigrant" by the given terms. I owned video games, and had a walkman as a childhood, but also had parents who made me look information up in the encyclopedia anthology we had in our basement growing up. I think I was too the native to these things, but as Spiegel mentioned, I do not see my relationship to media or technology remotely close to the youth that I work with. I find myself too saying things like "No, in the real world" as opposed to things that may be on social media like comments under an Instagram post. The assumptions Boyd mentions of youth being assumed to understand all technology based on their ability to navigate social media platforms that are native to them is something I experienced first hand with my mother as technology developed throughout my youth. I found that challenging in my youth without understanding until now the reasons as to why it was assumed I would be able to navigate these devices. I feel as though the term Spiegel brings forward "digital socialites" are becoming more and more common amongst the youth and it is becoming a social regression for humans today. I have a nephew who just competed his sophomore year of college, and he rarely has ever approached a person of interest in person. A majority of his interaction is based on reactions to social media posts, comments, liking pictures back and forth ; and there is an element of interaction or "game" that is lost there. 

I personally, mentioned this in class but I feel like the best way to summarize if we were looking for a term would be digital navigators. We are all navigating through this digital world in our own ways, some with more expertise than others, some starting fresh from scratch, some that know nothing other than a world where AI will be prevalent in their digital experience. I think of it as the scale of pain at the hospital. And there may be more than 1 scale. Just because I am proficient in posting and navigating my social media algorithms, doesn't ensure me to be able to upload your pictures from your camera to your laptop. I may be a 9 on the scale of navigating social media platforms, but a 2 on the scale of working with cameras and platforms for example. 

5 Pictures About Me