VERBATIM: Students, teachers discuss career paths amid rise of AI

“There’s a lot of things that AI can’t do, there’s a lot of things that require human imagination...You know, it’s a shortcut, you could use it to make something and then revise it. Things like graphic design could be replaced by AI because I’ve used AI image generators like DALL-E... I think they’re really powerful, but there’s also a lot of mistakes that those [AI] make. Sure it’s really helpful, but I don’t think it’s always perfectly reliable.”

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ARI SEEGER, freshman

“I am convinced that being a teacher will be one of the last jobs that will be largely human dominated. And the reason for this is because it’s purely like a Luddite reason right? People really feel like they don’t want robots teaching their kids even if in theory, a robot was better at it. And I am convinced that in the teaching career, we’ll face a lot of AI exposure anyways, but the chances that people will still be the dominant force will probably be expected.”

— KATIE FIRTCH, senior

“I definitely don’t want to go into an industry where most of it is artificial intelligence because I feel like in those kinds of industries, I probably wouldn’t have a job very long because I would be replaced by artificial intelligence pretty quickly.”

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MARCELLO ATTARDI, freshman

“I want to become a doctor in the future, preferably a dermatologist or an allergist. Since being a doctor is mostly an interpersonal job, and most people feel more comfortable talking to people instead of machines like AI, I don’t think AI will have that much of an effect on the job I’m having. But for medicine and ways to diagnose the patient, that might change because AI could potentially be a better WebMD. It could provide diagnoses made with a compilation of so much information that humans normally don’t possess. So I think that it will advance the field and act as a source for doctors. But I don’t think it will entirely replace doctors and their work with patients.”

— JESSICA BAE, sophomore

“I don’t think [AI] should be a barrier to any student that’s interested in any field, especially if it’s something creative in the arts and the humanities. That would be really upsetting and sad if people choose not to go into those fields because they think that AI is going to overtake it. There’s no way that artificial intelligence is going to be able to eliminate the need for creative human expression.”

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LIZZIE DEKRAAI, English teacher