Students are excited about AI, not dreading jobs impact

The recent wave of white-collar layoffs may have employees and job seekers rattled, but according to New York University Stern School of Business professor Robert Seamans, his current class of MBA students isn’t worried.

“I don’t get a huge sense that they’re dreading the job market or that they think there are going to be dramatic changes,” Seamans told a gathering of technology executives at last week’s CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City. “These students have been in the job market already before coming back to school and they’re used to the ups and downs of being in the workforce.”

Seamans said his focus in the classroom is making sure students have the skills they need when they graduate, and that includes generative AI and more generally, machine learning. Running experiments using AI in group settings is one way he gets students used to the technology, its advantages, and its limits.

For instance, he recently asked students to write a short paper on whether return-to-office mandates are good or bad for the workforce. He then had them select a large language model of their choosing to strengthen their argument. The second part of the assignment had students writing another paper, but this time asking the LLM to respond in an adversarial way with critical feedback — what Seamans calls a “black sheep” approach.

“I’m trying to get them to understand that they can interact with AI in a variety of ways,” Seamans said. He added that in his experiment, many of his students preferred the more adversarial way, perhaps because it more closely modeled the variety of opinions and thoughts in an actual workplace. “We don’t know what all the best practices are yet, but that’s why I want them to keep trying different things,” he said.

Earlier in the day at the TEC Summit, a group of students in high school and college spoke to CNBC’s Contessa Brewer about how they’re being exposed to AI (or not) in the classroom. Their responses show that despite the enthusiasm for the technology in the workplace, students are being advised to go slow.

Aarnav Sathish, a high school senior, said his teachers strictly discourage AI in the classroom. Outside of school, however, the 17-year-old uses ChatGPT for help with assignment busywork, quickly adding that he wants to use AI “as a tool and not a crutch.”

Ezinne Okonkwo, a 19-year-old undergraduate at Columbia University, said her professors also discourage students from using AI, instead preferring that they develop the subject matter skills needed for each class. However, like Sathish, she uses AI outside the classroom for tasks that feel repetitive or that she already knows how to do. “If I have to write a bunch of emails that all feel the same, I’ll use it to make them sound a little different,” Okonkwo said. “I won’t use it for coding if I don’t already know how to do it in that coding language.”

Siblings Carson and Andrew Boyer both attend Georgia Tech, yet are having different experiences with AI. Carson, 19, a sophomore, is studying engineering and said his professors allow AI in moderation. He finds it most useful for his Mandarin classes when he can use ChatGPT to practice having a conversation. “It’s like having a Chinese tutor,” he said.

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Andrew, 22, a senior, says his professors encourage AI usage, but they “don’t want us to copy and paste in AI work.” He was recently surprised when during a midterm exam for an information security class the teacher allowed students to use the internet and AI. While at first that seemed like a good thing, he soon realized that his professors set up the exam so that AI couldn’t complete a lot of the more nuanced and visual questions.

“I think the class average was like a 60,” Andrew said. “At Georgia Tech, they are evolving and upping the work to be more high-level concepts that we have to be able to understand and do on our own.”

If there was one thing that NYU’s Seamans wanted the room of tech executives to take away about the young people coming into their organizations, it’s that despite the focus on AI, ultimately employers are dealing with humans that require empathy and understanding.

“Everyone coming into your companies all have their own human skill set,” he said. “Some are good speakers or group leaders, others are great at finance. What they all want is a chance to work with this technology and become a contributing member to whatever team they’re on. AI is going to change, so what you really want is a workforce made up of active and engaged minds and a workplace where this kind of thinking is encouraged.”