{"id":34147,"date":"2025-11-14T13:50:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T13:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/34147\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T13:50:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T13:50:07","slug":"how-are-pitt-students-using-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/34147\/","title":{"rendered":"How are Pitt students using AI?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As AI creeps into college curriculums, Pitt students are deciding whether to use it and how to do so.<\/p>\n

While Pitt seeks to integrate AI<\/a> into classrooms and research, many students are skeptical of AI models for their usefulness in assignments, while others are optimistic about their potential.<\/p>\n

Danny Peelen, a junior computer science major, said he uses Claude<\/a> and ChatGPT for schoolwork. Peelen uses ChatGPT to generate templates for emails and essays and Claude for his coding work, saying Claude is better engineered<\/a> for coding-related tasks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite this, Peelen added that learning computer science fundamentals without the help of generative AI is crucial.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a software engineer, you need to have a good concept of the engineering process and how to actually build out code. In essence, that\u2019s the whole goal of a computer science program,\u201d Peelen said.<\/p>\n

Liam Brem, a sophomore computer science major, is currently a teaching assistant for CS 0445: Data Structures and Algorithms. Brem, who said the class focuses on computer science fundamentals, has witnessed the skill of fundamental coding decrease recently among students in the class.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the code that I see other people writing, it\u2019s not necessarily that you can tell it was AI generated right away, but when you start asking them questions about it, digging a little bit deeper, they don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on,\u201d Brem said. \u201cThat\u2019s a clear tell that it was AI generated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brem has \u201cdrastically\u201d reduced his own AI usage for coding over the last couple of weeks because he believes it inhibits his learning abilities. An MIT study<\/a> showed that those who used AI to help write essays exhibited weaker brain connectivity and memory retention.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince [ChatGPT] was released, the more I found myself using it, I was more productive and able to accomplish more, but I wasn\u2019t actually becoming well-practiced in the fundamentals,\u201d Brem said. \u201cIf you were to [have taken ChatGPT] away at one point, I probably would have been lost.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elise Silva, director of policy research at Pitt Cyber<\/a>, interviewed Pitt students about their use of AI with faculty from across Pitt\u2019s campuses. The study found that a majority of Pitt students use AI in an academic setting.<\/p>\n

Silva said she thinks the most significant findings of the study<\/a>, which was sponsored by Pitt Digital, were students\u2019 emotions about using AI, such as guilt, shame, fear, anxiety and distrust. Despite these negative feelings,\u00a0 Silva said, many would use AI anyway.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome students seemed wary of AI. But then later on in the focus group, they would disclose that they had used it when they were up against a deadline and didn\u2019t know what else to do,\u201d Silva said. \u201cEven students who maybe even ethically disagree with using AI, because of how hard it is to be a student, they\u2019re using it as a tool when they need it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study found students mostly used AI in productive ways and for work they deemed less important.<\/p>\n

\u201cStudents overwhelmingly, across departments and across disciplines, use it when they think something is not worth their while, like busy work,\u201d Silva said. \u201cWe see that a lot in discussion posts and when students don\u2019t understand the importance of [the work.]\u201d<\/p>\n

Doyle Keane, a senior psychology and neuroscience major, said he uses ChatGPT for literature searches and research analyses, which is helpful in his neuropsychology lab.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would say, \u2018Find me articles or sources relating to damage to Brodmann\u2019s area 44 and how that relates to Western Aphasia Battery,\u2019 or \u2018How did these scores affect this outcome?\u2019 or \u2018How does this variable affect this one?\u2019\u201d Keane said.<\/p>\n

For schoolwork, Keane said he uses AI mostly for long, menial parts of assignments or when he gets \u201ctotally stuck\u201d on a problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve used it to help me finish assignments when I\u2019m totally stuck on an assignment, not making any progress and I need to finish this so I can get to bed,\u201d Keane said. \u201cBut it\u2019s never something where I start an assignment and open it up immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aunomitra Mandal, a sophomore philosophy major, said she \u201crefuses\u201d to use AI for her schoolwork because she believes her major is inherently interdisciplinary and requires having context in prior reading and analysis.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t read something [in philosophy] without reading something else \u2014 without knowing about the ancients, without knowing about the ethics, without knowing about metaphysics,\u201d Mandal said. \u201cNo AI can analyze something for you. You have to know it for yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shreyash Ranjan, a junior computer science major, believes that using AI for fundamental computer science classes may harm job prospects that require technical interviews.<\/p>\n

\u201cFundamentals are probably the very first question that you\u2019ll get asked upon during an interview for any major tech company like Google, Meta, Amazon,\u201d Ranjan said. \u201cIf you\u2019re using AI through the entire class and you\u2019re not actually picking up on anything, you\u2019re going to get to the interview and fail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ranjan, a Claude Campus Ambassador<\/a>, said he believes Anthropic, the company that created Claude, spends more time ensuring their product is safe and useful. Ranjan said some of his friends in more difficult computer science classes use the chatbot as an assistant, guiding them through writing the code in a Socratic style.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ll go one section at a time and say \u2018Here\u2019s what I\u2019m thinking, here\u2019s what I\u2019ve written \u2014 Can you help me find errors or help me get to a solution a little bit faster?\u2019\u201d Ranjan said.<\/p>\n

Peelen said he uses ChatGPT to generate essay outlines rather than the actual writing because current AI \u201ccan\u2019t think\u201d or \u201cknow what [he] wants as a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think people conflate the fact that ChatGPT can reproduce language to mean that it actually can think,\u201d Peelen said. \u201cAt the end of the day, large language models model language. They know each word to produce after the other, but it actually has no cognition or actual idea of induction or deduction. It does not operate like a human brain at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mandal believes philosophy is rooted in the human experience and therefore cannot effectively utilize machines to further ideas.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI doesn\u2019t have experience in the real world, it can\u2019t have sense perception, it\u2019s not human,\u201d Mandal said. \u201cThat takes away from its ability to analyze, especially with philosophy, because [philosophy] is so based in the human experience. That\u2019s not something AI can replicate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since AI is trained on ideas from the internet, Mandal said she believes AI could be considered a form of plagiarism. From conversations with her philosophy professors, Mandal said they have emphasized the importance of students\u2019 brainstorming.<\/p>\n

\u201cTeachers have always been against [plagiarism] ever since our youth \u2014 the reason for that is not just because it\u2019s wrong to steal other ideas, but it\u2019s how we facilitate our own ideas, our own thought processes,\u201d Mandal said. \u201cAI doesn\u2019t come from nowhere. It uses all the ideas that were ever published on the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As AI creeps into college curriculums, Pitt students are deciding whether to use it and how to do…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34148,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[278,14241,21331,21332,73,75,74],"class_list":["post-34147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-ai","tag-chatgpt","tag-computer-science","tag-pitt-cyber","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}