Students engage in intercollegiate debate

Troy University welcomed students and faculty from the debate teams of the University of Alabama and Valdosta State University to hold an intercollegiate debate regarding the integration of Artificial Intelligence into higher education last Wednesday. 

The debate saw an atypical setup, in which both the affirmative side and the negation were comprised of one debater from each school. There was no winner, nor trophy, and the debate was held purely for exhibition. 

“Over time, intercollegiate debate has become, perhaps, a little too focused on competing and winning,” said Professor Michael Gray, Troy University’s debate faculty advisor. “So, I started thinking of ways to make it more collaborative and less focused on winning titles and trophies but still retain elements of competition that make the game fun.  

“Mixing up teams helps shift the focus in that way.” 

This organization of teams was a new concept for all of the debaters, one that was particularly interesting to a couple of them. 

“I think it was fine for me because a lot of my debate experience has been working with people that I’m not familiar with,” said Kelsey Mosely, a junior marketing major at the University of Alabama from Houston, Texas. “I think it’s no different that when you walk into a classroom and you don’t know everybody in the class, but you work with them.” 

Other students enjoyed the interactions of the different debate style. 

“It was cool to see different styles of speech and debate and kind of how that interacts live,” said Tristan Williams, a freshman chemical engineering major at the University of Alabama from Oakwood, Ohio. “It was really cool to see the other schools’ approach as they gave it.” 

As is expected of intercollegiate debate, the debaters were tasked with arguing for or against a particular resolution. Wednesday resolved that AI integration should be refused in higher education unless specific regulation and attribution are present.  

“I am deeply concerned that a powerful technology like this is being controlled almost entirely by corporations who are more concerned with profits and data harvesting than they are with proper education and ethical standards,” Gray said. “I personally believe that the best way to capture the most benefits and avoid the most harms is to find a way to give control of the technology to the people who are already responsible for educating students.  

“It is also the best way to protect those educators from what appears in many ways to be an attempted hostile takeover of the industry of education itself.” 

The affirmative side’s goal was to prove this resolution, and the negation’s goal was to invalidate the affirmative’s argument.  

“For me [the resolution] was very long so I was having to wrap my head around it like how much of this can I actually say no to without sounding like a jerk,” Mosley said, who was arguing for the negation. 

Another student on the negation side was Cassandra Ayers, a Valdosta State sophomore communications major from Formia, Italy, and she said the long resolution prompted her to take a different approach to the debate. 

“I wanted to focus on getting very philosophical because overall, it’s very hard to debate philosophy” Ayers said. “You could have ten different arguments for the same topic.” 

Ayers was able to debate on the side of the argument that aligned her personal beliefs, something that isn’t always the case for those participating in debate. 

“I don’t think it’s as revolutionary as people think” Ayers said. “The vast majority of people I know are using AI as a substitute for Google and Grammarly.  

“Those were already around; it just saves time.” 

Since no winner was assigned, the debate was followed by questions from the crowd and a general discussion. For more information on Trojan Debate, find them on Instagram @trojan_debate.