We note a report of Michael Vorenberg's very interesting thoughts on an issue many of us are coming to grips, the use of Artificial Intelligence by students in our legal history seminars. The following is from Sophia Barnett's story in today's Brown Daily Herald:
On the first day of his weekly seminar, “HIST 1972A: American Legal History, 1760-1920,” Vorenberg spoke candidly with his students about general attitudes regarding AI in education and the opportunities for exploration these developments afford.
“Most of what educators are hearing about are the negative sides of generative AI programs,” Vorenberg wrote in a message to The Herald. “I am also interested in how generative AI might be used as a teaching tool.”
Vorenberg outlined two broad potential uses for AI in his class: The examination of sources generated by ChatGPT — allowing students to probe into the “appropriateness” of the retrieved documents from a historian’s perspective — and the intentional criticism of said generated sources, understanding how a historian’s perspective could have produced a stronger source.
“The underlying assumption behind the exercise is that even a moderately skilled historian can do better at this sort of task than a generative AI program,” Vorenberg explained. “Until (this) situation changes, we who teach history have an opportunity to use generative AI to give concrete examples of the ways that well-trained human historians can do history better than AI historians.”
--Dan Ernst
