ABAC students are becoming increasingly more reliant on generative artificial intelligence (AI). Whether it be for making flyers and ads or writing essays, the use of AI has gotten out of control, and such use will only backfire on students who use it the most.
Using AI to complete assignments is not only lazy, but doing so is also detrimental to a student’s development and learning. Relying on generative technology does not allow a student to think critically—it arguably does not require a student to think at all. A student can copy and paste an essay prompt into an AI-generator and receive a response in mere moments. In this case, the student does not need to even glance at the prompt, let alone consider its questions or their own thoughts and ideas about the subject.
While a student might see AI as a time-saving tool, using AI in this way prevents students from harnessing their critical thinking skills and developing their own views. It keeps students from truly analyzing a question, observing their thoughts, doing accurate research, and applying their knowledge to their writing, which also allows them to learn how to construct sentences and put their thoughts into words and form valid arguments.
AI limits intellectual creativity as well. Say a student is given an essay prompt asking them to analyze the rhetorical devices and figurative language in “The Catcher in the Rye.” Rather than going through Holden Caulfield’s journey with him and seeking out these devices on their own, the student can enter the prompt into a generator with no effort, obtaining a response that satisfies the prompt.
I’ll be completely transparent: I’m that annoying classmate who will see a suspicious discussion post and run it through AI detectors. I do this because I do not want to waste my time replying to or engaging with someone who can’t be bothered to write a few original sentences for a single discussion post.
While I can’t speak for our professors, I can’t imagine that they want to read AI-generated slop either, let alone spend time grading it (or holding a subsequent meeting with the student and the dean for plagiarism).
Some students think AI is difficult, if not impossible, to detect, but that could not be further from the truth. I know I have a good eye for it, and I know others, including professors, can easily spot it as well.
AI is detectable because it rips any human personality and character from the work and transforms it into a soulless, monotonous regurgitation of information compiled from the internet. It’s even more detectable when the prompt is asking for an opinion, yet the AI-generated response—because it cannot have opinions—lacks a unique perspective and any sense of originality.
After all, AI stands for artificial intelligence. It does not mean “true” intelligence or “accurate” intelligence; it means a computer can string together words in a way that happens to make sense. In the same way, using AI shows that you are not utilizing your true intelligence; rather, you are relying on an artificial program to think and speak for you.
Think about it in simpler terms: artificial means fake; intelligence means smart, reasoning, or intellect. Why would you trust fake reasoning, fake intellect, to think and speak for you?