With the rise of ChatGPT and other models, I believe students around me and in our greater school community are becoming increasingly inept at the basic skills expected for us to learn. When confronted with a writing assignment, I hear other students talking about how they’ll “ask Chat[GPT]” or even blatantly boast about how they got an AI to write entire research papers, with little to no guilt or shame.
This increased reliance on “Chat” has diminished our ability to write and reason, but I do acknowledge the usefulness of AI in brainstorming or in being used as a study tool. It’s also a half decent search engine, if you check its sources. But if you’re just using it to write everything in school, it gets rid of the whole point of educating you if you’re just feeding prompts to ChatGPT.
If all you are is a vessel to take instructions to your AI of choice, why don’t your teachers just go talk to the AI themselves? Why should you be getting an education?
By relying on AI for writing, students are losing their ability to write their own thoughts. When you stop exercising a muscle, it atrophies, and it works the same in writing. In the post-AI world of education, I believe incoming students will lack the ability to write in the same way as students before, and it diminishes the value of education as a whole.
Many of my own classmates use AI to write, and barely even check the outputs before smuggling them into an assignment. This reveals another critical fault growing in the post-AI world, a lack of critical thinking. As students, we need to be able to think critically and discern sources’ truthfulness and their value, and you can’t be successful in life without any knowledge of what you’re talking about.
If an experienced programmer uses ChatGPT to code, they check it first, knowing it inevitably will contain some errors. It works the same in writing, you need to be able to check the writing of an output with a trained eye to get anything from it. Why can’t we do the same thing we do in programming with writing?
Additionally, AI use just wastes a teacher’s time. Why are they grading something that isn’t even yours? Does that grade really reflect anything about you if your work is being done by an AI model? Will the GPT Warriors have value in society?
If all we are are doomscrollers and prompt-engineers, why shouldn’t the AI take over?
