Lower Hudson valedictorians, salutatorians talk AI at Carroll F. Johnson award dinner

With the rise of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has become one of the buzziest topics in education, holding space as both a point of concern and a symbol of the future.

At the 56th annual Carroll F. Johnson Scholastic Achievement Dinner, hosted by the Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents to honor valedictorians and salutatorians, the region's top students were hopeful about a future where AI plays a bigger role but aware that the technology needs to improve.

"We shouldn't be fearing these things. We shouldn't be angry at them. We should be figuring out ways to use them to...not evade work but to enhance our work," said Julia Whalen, valedictorian of Yorktown High School.

AI in education

Students at the Wednesday dinner said AI's current uses were of limited help, but they envision a future where a more powerful model could have both positive and negative effects.

"It's going to change the way we see education," said Whalen, who plans on studying history at Bowdoin College.

While AI can be used to try to avoid doing work, the more "inspiring examples" Whalen had seen were "people who used it to enhance their work," by generating prompts or using it to put the finishing touches on an essay, they said.

Erik Ghalib, Hastings High School's salutatorian, who plans to attend Middlebury College and major in political science, said AI is now more useful for menial tasks, such as reformatting documents. Ghalib said he has found Microsoft Copilot to be more helpful than ChatGPT because it cites its sources.

"But when you're asking it to write something or compile information, I find that in its current state, it's really faulty," Ghalib said.

Sonya Lasser, Hastings High School valedictorian, who plans on attending Duke University and majoring in mechanical engineering, said she tried to use ChatGPT to study for a physics test this year with poor results. Lasser gave it multiple choice questions only for it to give her an answer that wasn't an option. Or it would give wrong information, she said.

Sophia Lam, salutatorian at Yorktown High School, who plans on attending Cornell to study chemistry or physics, said a prompt for a college supplemental essay asked for a reflection on a response from AI.

"I feel like just writing a reflection on what AI chose to write is such an interesting way to look at it," Lam said. "And then it's also interesting to see like what AI says versus what you would say."

ChatGPT "can be seen as a tool to get out of writing things," Lam said, but she thinks it can be a helpful tool to write down ideas. "But maybe we shouldn't become too dependent on it."

AI and art

Ghalib believes AI will improve, but right now "some of the stuff that we are seeing from it is scary in terms of what it can do to art." AI can sing and even impersonate artists, Ghalib said. Problems come when AI-generated music goes viral and makes money instead of being created by a real person who could make money from it, Ghalib said.

Whalen noted authors are using AI to create art for book covers.

Still, Whalen is less concerned about AI as a threat to artists. Art and writing created by humans remain more appealing because they "have an actual soul behind them," they said.

Societal impacts

Soon-to-be graduates described AI's possible uses and its potential broader, societal impacts.

"I think what it's going to probably end up doing as it improves is enhance the divide between like the educated and non-educated," Ghalib said, meaning that more educated people will be able to recognize when AI is wrong. "If you have not been taught to identify those things, you're going to take its hallucinations as fact."

"I think it's going to just perpetuate the amount of people that aren't going to know how to write, the amount of people that aren't going to know how to learn," Ghalib said. "Because it's going to be doing so much for us."

He doesn't necessarily think AI will take experts' jobs, but "I think it's going to probably hinder the amount of people that are going to reach the expert level."

Lakeland valedictorian Kris Dominic said a good use for AI would be simpler tasks, idea generation or to get inspiration.

"The human mind is going to have a greater range compared to AI, like no matter how well AI gets developed," said Dominic, who plans to attend New York Institute of Technology for its pre-med track.

AI in STEM careers

Maya Richards, Valhalla High School valedictorian, who plans on studying biochemistry at Cornell in the fall, learned about AI in a business Olympics class — that it could be useful in research and business, particularly in determining how feasible an idea is, or how well an idea will work or what impacts it might have.

Richards plans to pursue a career in pathology, the branch of medicine that diagnoses diseases, and she could see AI helping with that.

Richards recognizes the downsides, too. "Putting your ideas into AI might limit communication with other people." There needs to be a balance, she said.

Regulating AI: How schools are trying to find balance between ChatGPT, keeping student information secure

Whalen said they could see using AI more in the context of STEM and less in a creative capacity. But Whalen would also be open to using it for other tasks, like summarizing a long document instead of having to read the whole thing.

Johan Easaw, valedictorian of Walter Panas High School in the Lakeland school district, who plans on majoring in computer engineering at Purdue University, thinks regulations on AI pose an "unnecessary hinderance to technological advancement."

Easaw believes ethical concerns can be addressed in the development of AI, and he aims to develop models that have human-like values. Doing so would allow AI to make better decisions and "prevent their use for harm," Easaw said.

In a class at Manhattan College last summer, Patille Guekjian, salutatorian of Walter Panas High School, said they discussed the possible use of AI learning through images to identify defective parts, like in an engine for a plane, for example. But right now, "artificial intelligence is so new," Guekjian said, so "I think that it shouldn't be the sole reason for saying a part has no defects."

But in the future, when AI is more developed, relying on AI for something like that may be possible, Guekjian said.

Guekjian, who plans to major in aerospace engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, said the use of AI should be slowly integrated and backed up by a human.

Still, "I'm more of on the optimistic side," Guekjian said.

Scholarship winners

Sixteen graduates were awarded scholarships of at least $1,000 by the Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents at Wednesday's dinner. Students can renew the scholarships each year they are in good standing with their universities.

These are the scholarship winners:

Corporate Scholarship

Abass Na-Aata, Poughkeepsie High School

Kailee Mastropietro, Mahopac High School

Rylee McGinnis, Rockland BOCES Career and Technical Education Center

Katie Molina-Salazar, Yonkers Middle High School

Damaris Ferrer, Mount Vernon STEAM Academy

Engineering/Architecture/Math/ScienceScholarship

Claire Lewis, Arlington High School

Jonathan Bai, Croton-Harmon High School

Dahlia Kordit, Nanuet Senior High School

Penelope Cloonan, Yonkers Middle High School

Technology Scholarship

Glenn Moeller, Brewster High School

Judith Johnson Opportunity Scholarship

Emmanuelle Nickerson, FDR High School

Maylin Vasquez, Peekskill High School

Christian Laquidara, Clarkstown North High School

Haider Choudhry, Yonkers Middle High School

Stephen A. Perelson Memorial Scholarship

Britaney Sinclair, Mount Vernon High School

Bruce Bothwell Memorial Scholarship

Ava D-Arcy, White Plains High School

Contact Diana Dombrowski at ddombrowski@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @domdomdiana.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Lower Hudson NY valedictorians, salutatorians talk AI in art and STEM