Staff Writer: Raphiel Diederich
Ai is something we’ve all heard of by now. It’s the little friend in your phone, in your writing app and on your search engine – and it’s the little devil on your shoulder asking you to take the easy way out if you ask me. Some has said, “it’s a professor in your pocket.” It can do anything you can do mentally and creatively, on paper. If it can do all of that and more, why should we bother?
A teacher from ABAC, Maribel Green said when I was interviewing her, “I chose to do away with discussion boards this semester because I was tired of reading AI slop an answers to them. Instead, incorporating video posts to get a more authentic human discussion.” As a student, I can understand the grind of whipping out discussion posts, the fact it can often feel like busy work, yet I understand the academic need for them. It’s a way to share thoughts, expressions, and the way one analyzes new concepts. It appears with the rise of AI being this time saver illusion engaging in those ways to connect to those original ideas is becoming lost.
Some people have argued the usefulness of Ai, how we need to learn how to use it, but our interviewee had an interesting remark, “I’d had a discussion with someone, saying how Ai wasn’t much different than a calculator. But the thing is, it’s not just this tool, even if we look past ethical concerns. We don’t have a way to understand the scope of what it’s going to become.” She drives a point, one could try to compare AI to something that’s already existing, perhaps people freaking out about the creation of computers and other digital tools. Those have been innately different. It wasn’t this kind of its own unleashed upon others’ work and ideas to learn without bounds.
Another word, on the concept of calculators, even if someone wants to argue that it’s no different, I want to bring our memory to earlier education. Nearly all children had to learn subtraction, division, multiplication tables, and more mathematic formulas themselves. My roommate even remarked, “It wasn’t till third grade I even knew what a calculator was.” Even if there is this argument for it being a tool, I would like to counter the fact that critical thinking, finding answers, research, and formulating one’s ideas need to be heavily engaged and learned already before this tool is used. Another teacher on campus that had liked to remain more anonymous even has an addition to this, “I had asked my class what they thought critical thinking meant, trying to engage in conversation about the topic, and many of them pulled up definitions from googles ai answer.”
I also want to talk about how many have used AI to avoid struggling for something worthwhile. There’s this thing said on the internet, “AI makes things more accessible for the disabled.” From what I’ve seen on videos, there are many people with disabilities that are willing to put in the extra thought, the process of trying and failing or even using resources that are made just for them by other people. There are even artists who are painting with their feet, or mouths, or with limited limbs instead of feeding their ideas into a generator.
This recent atmosphere has become quite careless in short cuts, and reliant on instant gratification, and AI seems to have monopolized those behaviors. The thing is that AI and critical thinking don’t only impact the world of academia; it is impacting people as a whole. Many forget that the point of learning and higher levels isn’t only about understanding classes. It’s about understanding and connecting with other people within your environment. Shortcuts of thinking in Ai aren’t just a short cut in a discussion board or essay; it’s a shortcut of human connection.
Another thing we see today is people using it not only to minimize thinking in academia, but media and arts as well.