NAMED NATIONAL FOUR-YEAR DAILY NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR FOR 2020-21 IN THE COLLEGE MEDIA ASSOCIATION’S PINNACLE AWARDS
Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023
Volume 160 No. 11 WWW.SJSUNEWS.COM/SPARTAN_DAILY
SERVING SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY SINCE 1934
Black Power Statue vandalized By Dominique Huber STAFF WRITER
A man vandalized San Jose State’s Olympic Black Power Statue by urinating and vomiting on it Saturday. The man, whose name was not released, was apprehended by SJSU University Police Department officers shortly after the incident. He was charged with vandalism, possession of unlawful paraphernalia and other misdemeanor counts. When questioned by UPD officers, the man said he vandalized the statue under the impression that it was paying homage to human trafficking. “That shows you that his reality was a little different,” said UPD Capt. Frank Belcastro. Officers concluded the man was not under the influence of substances at the time of his arrest. The statue was not permanently damaged. A passerby used a bluelight phone on campus to alert UPD of the incident. The bluelight phones were placed all over SJSU to connect users directly to the UPD Communications Center. A passersby reported seeing the man vandalize the statue and promptly move to Clark Hall where they said he began pulling on the doors repeatedly. UPD received a second call that night from another individual who said the man was trying to open the doors of Hugh Gillis Hall. The patrol officers on duty responded to the calls and searched for the man based on a description the first reporting party provided. They found him a few blocks away where he ran from officers before being arrested. Michelle Smith McDonald, SJSU’s senior director of media relations, said the man was charged with VANDALISM | Page 2
CAROLYN BROWN | SPARTAN DAILY
San Jose State’s Olympic Black Power Statue stands clean on Monday after it was vandalized on Saturday night.
Experts evaluate academic ethics behind ChatGPT By Jillian Darnell OPINION EDITOR
COOLCAESAR, CC BY-SA 4.0 VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
SJSU alumni reflect on recent tech layoffs By Dylan Newman STAFF WRITER
Tech layoffs continue to affect Silicon Valley’s workers by the thousands with companies including Yahoo and Zoom among the most recent to make layoffs. The tech and biotech industries have reached a milestone of 20,000 positions that have been or are projected to be cut in the Bay Area layoffs, according to an article published by The Mercury News on Feb. 14. Among the people who have been laid off is San Jose State alumnus, Shreyam, who requested to be referred to by his first name for security reasons. He graduated from SJSU in 2020 with a master’s in software engineering. Shreyam said he was working for the data and cloud company NetApp, when it announced a cut of
8% of its global workforce at the end of January. He said his experience is a pressing issue for those who are in the U.S. on a work visa. “Even though there are openings, the job market is saturated with talented professionals due to the massive layoffs, so the competition is high for each open role,” Shreyam said. “Along with that, candidates on a temporary visa like an H-1B or F-1, have only a few weeks to find a job, or else they lose their visa status and cannot stay in the country.” H-1B is a worker’s visa that allows companies to employ non-citizens to live and work in the U.S., according to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services webpage. F-1 visas are given to foreign students and allow them to live and study in the U.S. without citizenship, according to the same webpage. TECH | Page 2
OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company, has created a free online tool known as ChatGPT, a language processing program that uses AI to generate responses to designated prompts. College students have been using ChatGPT as a tool for their assignments to explore different ways of responding to prompts for written assignments. QuickBites, an initiative sponsored by San Jose State’s Humanities and Arts in Action program, held “ChatGPT: Help or Hype?” a virtual event where professionals from SJSU discussed this topic. The event was hosted by Sara West, assistant professor of professional and technical writing, and education professor Roxana Marachi. “If students are going to be using it, they are cheating themselves, they’re not getting the education they paid for,” Marachi said. West and Marachi spoke about AI and what the existence of ChatGPT means for the future of students’ learning. ChatGPT accesses information from the internet to retrieve and apply knowledge to the written response it generates. Marachi said not all the information from the AI is accurate and that the AI is a “con artist.” “ChatGPT is really good at telling us what we want to hear,” Marachi said. “Someone who is struggling may ask ChatGPT what to do,
and that is a problem.” West and Marachi tested the accuracy of the program by putting in prompts relating to their research. They found that ChatGPT would have false information, citing things that were incorrect. “It’s designed to almost produce that misinformation, because it’s not designed to go look up the person and then give you the information,” West said. “It’s designed to guess what word is next.” During the event, the speakers discussed how ChatGPT has the ability to generate written responses to prompts based on data patterns. West and Marachi said there is no guarantee the information will be completely accurate and there have been instances when ChatGPT has failed in generating factual information. There was also a discussion on the AI potentially inputting harmful, discriminatory information that could create a bad reputation for the student if they’re not careful. “Then you’re going to be responsible for that text, not the AI,” West said. The Peabody EDI Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion from Vanderbilt University sent out an email to the school population regarding the recent Michigan State University mass shooting that occurred on Feb. 13. The office used ChatGPT to generate the email and students were outraged by the misinformation in GPT | Page 2