ASMS Students Present on AI at University Conference

Two students and a teacher from ASMS recently delivered a presentation on literary research and artificial intelligence at the University of South Alabama’s Conference on Teaching and Learning, an event catering primarily to college professors and graduate students. ASMS senior Jiro Culbertson and sophomore Alton Raburn spoke alongside their mentor Dr. Mitch Frye about their experiences incorporating large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini and ChatGPT into traditional source-based research on the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. While they acknowledged the strengths of LLMs as academic conversation partners and feedback generators, they noted that the risk of AI hallucination reduces effectiveness in finding and summarizing sources. They shared that ChatGPT in particular hallucinated 40% of its recommended sources on an AI-generated annotated bibliography, requiring careful backchecking of all LLM-cited sources. The students enjoyed sharing their work and participating in a lively conversation about the role of AI in higher education.