Ever heard of Cassandra? Probably not her name, but that kid in the back with the red eyes? It’s not because she’s sad, it’s because she only talks to chatbots. This is her first year using AI, so maybe you’ve just forgotten about her because you don’t see her as much. She isn’t incapable of making friends, it’s just easier to use chatbots. She dreads internet and power outages because she could lose her only friends. At school, AI does all her work. She gets good grades, but she knows nothing. She used to get Fs all the time, so once she found out about AI, she saw a solution. She never put in any effort. She uses AI to create art, even though it means that she herself doesn’t absorb the skill. Now Cassandra is highly praised by her teachers because her work is better sounding. But what her teachers don’t know isn’t hers… dun dun dun!! Cassandra didn’t take something into account, though. Eventually April comes around, bringing her STAAR test. She FAILS AND GETS HELD BACK TO KINDERGARTEN!! Her teachers no longer praise her and instead are extremely disappointed.
Yes, it’s dramatic, but a lot of this is actually real. Long-term engagement with AI can lead to psychosis, delusion, laziness and lack of knowledge, as well as lack of common sense (as shown by the American Psychological Association). So, what’s acceptable in terms of usage? And why would such a tool be given to the public?
The biggest question playing on your mind is probably, “Well, how should I feel?” There’s a lot of mixed opinions, so we asked our students and teachers at iUP what their view on AI was. An anonymous eighth grader reported back, “My view is AI can be helpful for people that need clarification on assignments. But it must not be used for art or to get an answer to a problem. However, if a student has a teacher available, then no AI. It’s also bad because it uses a lot of water.”
Madelyn Borgman, responded to our interview with, “Well, I think AI can be very helpful to students, but I also think it can hurt them and negatively affect their learning. I personally do use AI, but I try to use it so that I can help me instead of giving me the answers which would actually hurt me. For example, I used it a couple days ago to make a study guide for an upcoming test which helped me prepare for it. It can be tricky though as when you take advanced courses the easiest thing to do would be just to ask AI for the answer. What I like to think to reframe that thought is that even though it might help me now, in the long run it will only hurt me because I won’t be understanding the concepts.” When asked about what she knew about environmental impact, she responded, “I have a little knowledge. However, I believe that AI uses water to power their companies and I feel that companies should be able to use a different resource that doesn’t hurt our Earth as much. Because while we do have a lot of water, we only have so much.”
We also asked Madi Famada, 8th grade, and she said “I think if AI is okay to use or not depends on the situation you’re in. If it’s for an assignment for school, obviously no. However, if it is something you were doing for fun such as writing fanfiction or a story, using AI is acceptable to check grammar and spelling errors that a human might not have caught. As long as you don’t have AI write the entire story, it’s okay to use. I also myself, as a songwriter, have AI review songs that I’m working on and tell me what I could do better on them.”
Among our interviews, we had a golden opportunity to interview Mr. Haroon Abdel-Rahman, a Senior Customer Solutions Leader, Cloud-Computing & AI, in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Mr. Abdel-Rahman says, “Generative AI answers depending on the training material it was trained on. If trained on topics relevant to the question, then the probability of the answer being accurate increases. But keep in mind that you can never get a clear, accurate answer from AI alone. One of the features of AI, designed to give you an answer no matter what, is called AI “hallucination”. Hallucination is whenever AI gives you an incorrect or made-up answer for your prompt because 1) it was not trained to give an answer on that topic or 2) the question was not optimized enough to get a good answer.”
When asked whether students should use AI in classwork, Mr. Abdel-Rahman says, “ In my opinion, it is OK for students to use AI to POLISH their work, not change it in any way or do the work for them. But I am 100% against using AI to replace studying, investigation, analysis, or any form of learning, such as research. If you use AI to do YOUR work, you have guaranteed 2 things: 1) you lack a fundamental soft skill that any job mission or profession in the world will need whether you become a physician, bus driver, or an AC technician, and 2) you’re guaranteed to be a sub-optimal user or beneficiary of AI, and you will surely sink sooner or later in AI slum and integrate AI hallucination into your core beliefs.”
We also asked a couple of teachers, but this response really stood out from Mrs. Dearmond.
“I believe AI can be a very useful tool if used correctly. The problem with it is the tendency for people to let it do all the work for you.”
Again, you may ask, what’s acceptable? AI was meant to be a tool. However, we functioned as a society without the mass-usage of it.
PROS
There can be benefits to AI, like
-instant feedback
-inspiration
-studying
-instant comfort
-proofreading
-reduction of human error
-economic growth
Artificial intelligence is very good at routines and keeping tabs on things, and when it does something repetitively, it becomes better at it, much like the human brain. It is also known for its efficiency, and it studies you to know what you like and how to help you.
But if such good reasons exist, why are people so against it?
CONS
Yes, AI is a tool, but what’s the point if the tool IS the work, not you using it to help you do the work?
-AI is designed so it does the work for you. No matter what you do, it becomes less of a tool and more of a replacement.
-AI is terrible for the environment. The truth of the matter is, with the mass-usage of AI, it needs to be able to run. This is done through data centers. Lots of them. And because there’s so much usage, they heat up very quickly, so it uses a lot of water to cool it.
-While AI can prompt ideas, none of them will be original. It’s impossible when built on past human experience and creativity on the internet.
-Instant gratification can be really bad on the mind and contributes to low attention span and tolerance although it feels good at the beginning.
-It steals from authors and artists out in the world. If your art was uploaded some day, AI has trained on it. If you’re a singer, your lyrics have been trained on as well as your voice. If you’re an author, your phrases have been written into someone’s essay that they were too lazy to write themselves.
WHAT CAN I DO INSTEAD?
So many benefits and such an easy way out of everything. How do you escape that? Here are just a small amount of suggestions out of a large selection of other possibilities:
Essay review?
- Have a friend, teacher or a parent read it, or just submit it! Your teachers are there to help you out and give you feedback.
Study guide?
- Flashcards on websites made just for studying (like Quizlet or Blooket! There are also gameshow-style study guides to google)
Here’s the tough one. What if you need inspiration?
- If you want to write a story or something, spin a wheel! You could do this for one piece of the story and I guarantee it’ll flow just as well, if not better than AI.
If it isn’t helping, the AI wouldn’t either unless it’s doing it for you.
Lonely?
- There are tons of websites with positive quotes! Otherwise, journaling is so helpful.
Need art but it somehow doesn’t exist?
- Clipart! You can get pictures of different aspects of the image no matter what you’re looking for because they exist for everything imaginable.
And yes, AI doesn’t always give the answer, but it doesn’t know how to actually help you grow. It just knows how to get you there. So, with all the studding of growth and negative impacts, maybe it’s time to put ChatGPT down and find a new assistant, such as your brain. Plus, who knows, maybe you’ll get some new skills! There will always be positives and negatives to both sides, but maybe it’s time we remind ourselves of what it’s like to be human. We can’t forget our own abilities because there’s something to have them for us.
