ECON 311: Economics, Causality, and Analytics
A Short Note on A.I.
You are currently enrolled in a course you can think of as an introduction to both econometrics and the programming language R. You are enrolled in said course during a time in which artificial intelligence (AI) is booming. AI’s capabilities seem to be, paradoxically, endless yet expanding. It is quite possible that AI will end up being the most transformative technology since the internet, and ignoring it would be foolish. As we get started in this course, I want to provide a few additional thoughts on AI and its use in this course. I provided a short statement in the syllabus, and I would like to elaborate a bit to help you understand the statement.
AI inside the Classroom
Detecting AI is not terribly difficult. Just like how individuals have particular ways of writing and speaking, they also have particular ways of coding. This can be the way someone uses spaces, capitalization, comments, etc. Each student in this course will develop their own specific way of writing code that looks and feels like their own. When you learned to write sentences and paragraphs, you probably made simple mistakes like starting a sentence with “but” or “and”, or forgot to capitalize a proper noun, etc. As you are learning to code, you will make the programming version of these mistakes. Your use of space will be inconsistent, you will forget to use comments, and your code will sometimes be inefficient or verbose while other times overly terse. All of these things are totally OK and ultimately part of the learning process. On the other hand, the code AI will generate will make it look like you have been coding for years. AI will use functions and libraries that do not appear in the course notes, it will provide perfect documentation, and adhere to obscure style guides. I have seen it happen time and time again over the past year or so. As per the answer revision policy, I rather students submit incorrect work that is their own, than flawless, AI-generated answers. Maybe this is obvious, but the point of homework, exams, papers, etc., is to assess your learning, and your job is to demonstrate to me that you have indeed learned. If you hand in AI generated material, you have a) rendered the assignments useless and b) not demonstrated your knowledge.
AI outside the Classroom
Hopefully, at this point, you’ve been convinced not to use AI specifically for generating answers to assignments in this course because it is easy to detect and will result in poor grades. This is not meant to scare you, but rather inform you. Moreover, this is not meant to discourage you from using AI in other ways while taking the course. For example, perhaps you think I did a lousy job of explaining a specific topic in the notes. You can, and you should, prompt AI for an alternative explanation. As another example, maybe you do not understand some code I wrote in the notes. Ask AI to provide a line-by-line explanation of said code. These are all excellent uses of AI that still require engagement with the material.1 That said, let’s suppose you bested me. You used AI the entire course and never got caught. Do you know who else can use AI? Literally everyone else you will compete with in the labor market. Why should an employer hire you if you have the same abilities as the next person? If you take this class seriously, and put in the effort, you will learn skills that will help you stand out and be competitive in the labor market.
Footnotes
Of course, you could always just talk to me about these things, too. That is one of the things you are paying for, afterall!↩︎