Research Paper: Humans vs Generative AI Tools: Analyzing English Literature in an AI-Driven World.

March 2024 | Colegio San Agustin-Makati | Manila, Philippines

Throughout the Fall 2023 semester, five STEM students and I worked on a study addressing topics within the Department of Science and Technology’s Harmonized National Research & Development Agenda. My team tackled AI technology within the “Industry, Energy, and Emerging Technologies” section. Our study tackled how AI understands English literature given its obscurity and imaginative nature. A crucial role I played in this project was conducting research and data analysis and finding question prompts for both human and AI participants to respond to. During the initial stages of the project, I was responsible for conducting research to understand current issues in AI-driven information analysis. Later on, I took on the role of finding open-ended question prompts on the interpretation of Kate Chopin’s “A Story of an Hour”. These tasks allowed me to enhance my research skills. Lastly, I was responsible for analyzing the data gathered using Orange, a data analysis software. Using Orange, I created a word cloud program to analyze the frequency of certain keywords in the responses. This was helpful for the team as it saved us a lot of time, especially given the time constraints. This allowed me to practice my critical thinking and data analysis skills.

Thankfully, all these efforts paid off as my team was chosen to present our study at the PIGKIAN research fair on March 25, 2024. Our team was fortunate to receive the “Best Research Poster” award.

Reflecting on this experience, I have learned the importance of resourcefulness, especially for a large project. There’s a saying that if someone has more constraints in a project, they become more creative and resourceful in their choices. While working on this project, we couldn’t really set aside our academics and other extracurriculars to give this project our full attention. Aside from this, our timeline was extremely tight, as we had to work on this project for 10 weeks. And on top of that, we were just high school students with no exceptional expertise in quantitative data analysis. These numerous pressures challenged us to make choices that wouldn’t take much time and wouldn’t be too complicated for the team. An example of this was our deployment of Orange rather than traditional content analysis methods. Overall, I think this project really prepared me for the other projects that I faced later on.