AI at Trinity: Feigned Innovation for a False Future

Alex Gervais ’28

Executive Opinion & Design Editor

At Trinity, we are asked to be “bold, independent thinkers who lead transformative lives.” It’s an ethos that many of us try to live by as we work in groundbreaking research labs, intern for inspiring leaders and pave our own path into the future. Here we dare to be bold and innovate.

Yet Trinity must be mindful of the specific innovation we sponsor and cultivate here on campus. Recently, the College featured a student led project on its social media platforms: the 2123 Project. As a part of Hartford’s “Innovation Week” that is sponsored by the Center for Entrepreneurship, the project looked beyond Trinity’s relatively recent 2023 bicentennial and into the future, to a Trinity 100 years from now. During this project, Trinity students crowdsourced ideas on future technologies from the Trinity community and then used AI image generation to “imagine” what our future may look like. They asked questions wondering about the future role that AI and robotics could play in communication, transportation and our daily lives. The project culminated with a coffee table book of AI-generated images about what Trinity could look like in 2123 and an event with College President Dan Lugo and Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam in attendance.

While I applaud that Trinity students are considering our future, a project reliant on generative AI is not enough to uphold Trinity’s innovative mission. When we turn to AI to “imagine” our future, we betray the liberal arts ethos of genuine thought and analysis that our school was built on. Generative programs like ChatGPT and DeepSeek have replaced the critical thinking skills of not only the general public, but of students here at Trinity. A walk through Trinity’s library on a weeknight will yield the disturbing sight of ChatGPT open on many computers with students not performing complex prompt engineering or backend LLM analysis, but simply plugging questions from Moodle directly into AI. This is an issue that does not only plague our school; 54% of college students will use AI weekly to help with assignments. While there is absolutely a place for some AI at Trinity—backend large language models can help us deepen our research and aggregate data (and have been around since the 50s)—generative AI serves as no harbinger of progress or innovation on our campus and Trinity must commit to not funding projects that primarily use generative AI.

Generative AI is also a tool seeming to fall out of the vogue in the business world that we claim to innovate for. The private sector has already begun rollbacks in its generative AI investments, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently warning of an AI bubble ahead of his next earnings report and in the wake of a failed AI powered product demo. 95% of generative AI startups and pilot programs are currently failing. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even admitted that his newest Sora video generation product is only a cash grab to sponsor further research into generative AI. If Trinity is looking for an innovation lane, generative AI is absolutely not the future we should pursue. 

As a designer and digital artist, it’s frustrating to watch as projects at Trinity turn to AI image generation rather than cultivating the arts on campus. We already have minimal course offerings for digital artists and designers on campus, so extracurricular design opportunities become all the more important. It’s essential that our digital artists have structured opportunities to participate in Trinity’s visual arts beyond just designing posters for club meetings or taking intro level classes; we need genuine competition. A commitment to cultivating the arts on campus is the best way that Trinity can ensure that all of our students have a chance to practice and hone their hard earned skills. The Center for Entrepreneurship should’ve sought out designers and artists at Trinity, not relied on AI to imagine our future.

At a time when our future is fundamentally in question, I challenge Trinity’s leaders of tomorrow to actually imagine what our future can be. We should crowdsource community thoughts and artwork, we should look critically at where we are and how we can craft our future, but we must define what we can imagine not by artificial intelligence, but by ourselves.