Written by: Mathieu Yuill on September 5, 2023

I have been using AI to write articles, create marketing plans, help me think of what I might missed, check grammar and spelling, create art (images) but mostly, I use it in automation, writing simple code for websites and creating complex spreadsheet functions really quickly.

In high school I was one of the first classes who were taught typing on PCs and not typewriters. We used WordPerfect in a DOS environment and even though you could apply formatting to the typed text like bold, italics and underline, you needed to know the keyboard shortcuts to make it happen. I was in love with technology so I quickly learned all the ways to format my document including changing fonts, margins and more. I also learned how to use spellcheck.

One day, after mid-terms, I was called into the vice-principal’s office because I had been accused of cheating in keyboarding class. The teacher had seen me using “CTRL + F1” which was the spellcheck function (SHIFT + F7 was to print for some reason). Because I had used spell check I was cheating on my work because you lost marks for spelling things wrong – words that had been spelled incorrectly in keyboarding class was a sign you weren’t very good at touch typing. I was sassy in my young age and challenged the teacher and vice-principal that if the point of the class was to ensure I could type and not make errors then hadn’t they taught me perfectly?

This made perfect sense to me but I think it broke them a bit. In the end I wasn’t in trouble and I was told not to show anyone else the “secret shortcut” to correct spelling.

In today’s world we have three groups of people: digital natives, digital immigrants and digital refugees. I consider myself a digital immigrant. I grew up in a world where digital tools were being invented but certainly hadn’t been perfected and new ones were being invented all the time. So I consider myself a digital immigrant because I have come to the technology because I want it. I see these great tools and I come to them, learn them, adopt them and use them as best I can. Sometimes it feels like a second language to me but I am so happy to use them.

My mother, on the other hand is a digital refugee. She did not want to leave her home but when banks and utility companies began going paperless with bills and invoices she was forced to get a better computer and learn how to check email regularly. She had to get on social media to see photos of her grandchildren and if she wanted to speak regularly with her children, she had to learn how to text. She would have preferred to stay in her analogue world but that just wasn’t possible.

And of course the digital natives are the Millennials and younger. They have grown up with digital tools and it’s a part of their life. I see it with clients whose websites I manage, the use of mobile devices over desktop computers to purchase and browse sites is far greater with digital natives.

Many of the presenters spoke about Chat GPT and the use of it becoming more prevalent in society but places where we value pure knowledge, like academia, we are more suspicious of it and AI generally.

How it might endanger and limit my studies includes AI’s sometimes delivering of wrong or biased information. Because AI content is only as good as its dataset, there is no way to ensure the information it has been trained on does not come with biases that may do great harm to the output of my academic studies. In addition, I use GPTZero in my work and often it highlights my original text as potentially written by AI. I am confident this is because in an early journalism job I had, I was encouraged to use lots of flowery words, adjectives and highly conversational language. When I write this way, my work can sometimes be marked as high as 90% AI.

How it has an is helping my studies is has sped up my work. I often will post my work, the rubric and then ask AI “What am I missing to do well on this assignment”. The AI tool will look at the rubric and then what I have written and suggest areas for improvement. I have also input all of my sources and asked it to output footnotes and bibliography.

AI can be great. But garbage in equals garbage out. I often write more about the prompt than the output text. This is because I want to spend my time on data and not the actual piecing words together in an intimate way.

About the Author

Mathieu Yuill

While raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens may be a few of Julia Andrews' favourite things, here are a few of mine: Talking to strangers, Learning about what you do for fun, Conversation over coffee. I own a marketing and communications company in Toronto, Canada called Leading With Nice. There are a lot of names I could have given the company but a trusted friend encouraged me to name it that because I really value the humanness in us all. Bah - this is starting to sound like a horrible LinkedIn post. So whatever, let's have coffee. I'd love to hear about what you do for fun!

• Link
• Facebook
• Twitter
• instagram