Jessie Hendriks (MA ’24) is fuelling conversation about the relationship between academic disciplines and artificial intelligence (AI).

Hendriks will join nearly 1,000 graduands crossing the stage on Friday, Oct. 18 during Brock University’s 116th Convocation, where she will receive a Master of Arts in English.

Straddling the intersection of education and English studies, her research investigates early, instinctive reactions to AI in academic settings.

“I wanted to know more about how English scholars were reacting to the seemingly sudden appearance of artificial intelligence and large language models in the classroom that could be seen as stepping on the toes of those studying language and literature,” Hendriks said.

Embarking on a mixed-methods study, Hendriks gathered reactions from English Language and Literature faculty and students to explore how each group felt about AI use and how they envisioned it being used in the future.

Hendriks said her findings generally took two directions.

“There were the things I was looking for that I found, like their general attitudes towards ChatGPT, but then there were things I wasn’t looking for but made their way into the data, like how misconceptions about one another’s perspectives on AI might spark tensions between faculty and students,” she said.

Curious if faculty and students had a good understanding of how the other group was reacting to overall and how they intended to use AI, Hendriks found most students were not enthusiastic about using the technology.

She said students presented very nuanced and mostly strongly negative opinions about AI, which reaffirmed her belief that more discussion is needed in the context of English and AI use as an academic discipline.

“We are seeing many conversations about STEM students and AI and how it’s affecting their work, for example how they write code or their ability to sort data, but we need to ask more questions about how the technology is affecting our writing-based programs,” said Hendriks.

Allowed to go unarticulated and uninvestigated, AI discourse could veer into troubling territory whereby people are reacting to it without intentionality resulting in reactions that do not fully reflect how they really feel about it, she said.

“One of the most interesting takeaways was that faculty and students both had very different expectations for how they thought AI would continue to play out in the classroom, but when asked about how they wanted AI to play out in years to come, they had very similar hopes for the future,” Hendriks said.

She is building on this work while pursuing a PhD in Education at Queens University, and the scope of her research — and questions — is only getting bigger, arguing for the need to further investigate the role specific academic disciplines play in the assessment and adoption of AI and new technology.

Hendriks said answers to these questions could help society move forward in more informed, ethical ways when it comes to AI.

On a small scale, her “research showed that students did not like the idea of ChatGPT telling them how to feel about the book they read, but they really loved that it was able to tell them why the comma should not go in that part of the sentence.”

On a larger scale, Hendricks said this way of thinking offers valuable insights into how users are engaging with AI tools with the potential to inform future use in a more ethical and sustainable way.

“In the context of Humanities, which centres the human experience, there is no better time to consider our relationship to AI and how the decisions we make today will shape the future,” she said.