CS Professor weighs in on how he uses AI uses ethically.
By Vincent F
On November 10th,2022, Out of every teacher in NYC, only 20 educators were invited to discuss technology’s potential future and ethical concerns with AI.
When it comes to teaching at a Google hosted master class on artificial intelligence in Chelsea Market in Manhattan.
One of those educators was Joseph Frusci, a professor of both computer science & history here at CSI. With nearly two decades worth of experience in cybersecurity, which AI has already long been a part of, Frusci has been one of many working to educate & promote the ethical use of this new and controversial technology.
“Anyone can use AI platforms, but not everyone understands how to use them ethically,” said Frusci. “As educators, we were thinking about how we can use AI to facilitate critical thinking skills.”
Since the 2023 fall semester, Frusci has used ChatGPT to help him create lesson plans for his history courses at CSI. A common fear with generative AI is that as it uses the greater internet to gather its data, it will be prone to misinformation. However, through use of ChatGPT’s extended features. Frusci builds his own smaller scale GPT’s that only pull from sources he has curated.
As such, the custom GPT Frusci uses for his history courses only uses data from select history textbooks, as well as various NYC Department of Education resources. By limiting and organizing the data this way, Frusci can also prompt the AI more specifically to get fine-tuned results.
Of course, Frusci was very transparent about his AI usage to his history students. Likewise, he taught them how to use ChatGPT in this way for their own benefit.
“I didn’t know ChatGPT was a thing until he pulled it up,” said Luis Martinez, who was a student in Frusci’s history class in the fall of 2023. “A lot of the students in that class were interested in becoming teachers, so he was showing us how to build lesson plans with it.”
Outside of CSI, Frusci has also taught at Staten Island Technical High School since 2014. There, AI has already made a massive impact, as the school received a pilot contract from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
For example, at his computer science class in SI Tech, Frusci’s students are allowed to generate code via ChatGPT to compare to their own work. However, to discourage students from using AI to plagiarize, they are not allowed to submit the code that ChatGPT generated directly.
Like Frusci, SI Tech principal Mark Erlenwein has hope for AI. Even if his teachers don’t want to use it for their own purposes, Erlenwein encourages them to learn the in’s and out’s of the technology to make sure their students use it ethically and to prepare them for the future.
“SI Tech is the only school in New York with this pilot contract for OpenAI,” said Frusci. “We are the tip of the sword.”
Alongside Frusci and Erlenwien is Dr. Jared Jax, who teaches physics at SI Tech. Besides using AI for his own lessons, Jax was also interested in the potential business applications of AI. Thus, he teamed up with Frusci to create a new company called “Dr. AI Solution.”
Through this company, Frusci will host a series of educational course videos on the site Thinkific, teaching viewers to use AI ethically and productively. The project has been in development since last May, and they plan to go online before Thanksgiving this year.
“I was interested in AI as an educational model,” said Frusci, “while Jax was interested in AI as a business. We decided to put the two together.”
