AI can be a useful tool to help people understand subject matter. That’s a fact that will only continue to get stronger as AI and its software continues to get better. However, many students tend to overuse and abuse the tool. With the easy access to AI systems like ChatGPT, students over rely on it, hindering the growth of their own cognitive skills.
Many students these days make videos on TikTok about how they simply cannot believe that students in the past used to write essays and do homework without the help of technology or AI. This leads the students of today unable to think critically for themselves and without the help of any sort of AI.
The problem is that students rely on AI tools such as ChatGPT to write their essays, professors and teachers are faced with wondering if essays and homework written by AI is plagiarism.
Sofia Barnett, in her article, “ChatGPT Is Making Universities Rethink Plagiarism” the question of whether or not an essay written by something nonhuman and with no discernable human source can count as plagiarism is a rising concern of higher education.
AI like ChatGPT scrapes the internet to properly articulate its responses, meaning that it essentially could be seen as stealing the work of others that is already published on the internet. In order to counter this, teachers have started to use AI programs such as Turnitin to determine whether or not something is plagiarized or not.
However, as Turnitin is AI as well, it is not entirely perfect and makes mistakes in its discernment of what is and is not plagiarism and can incorrectly mark words and phrases as plagiarism when they are not. There is also concern that AI is not adept at teaching students social and emotional skills.
According to researcher Jorge Perez in “Implementing Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Pros and Cons from the Perspectives of Academics,”
People “need social interaction and a sense of belonging to a community,” both of which are associated with the process of acquiring information in academic environments.
He added that “requires physical interaction and communication, and machines or software” are unable to create conditions that nurture the emotional and social intelligence of students regardless of age.
AI is not adequately adept at recreating the needed environment to teach students to grow emotionally and socially. AI is not conducive to properly nurturing and maturing students in aspects of life outside of lectures and assignments.
According to the article “Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence in Education,” the more reliant we become on AI the more it “raises apprehensions about the loss of human interaction, as personalized learning experiences driven by algorithms may diminish the crucial teacher-student and peer interactions that contribute to holistic learning.”
Human interaction is one of the most important aspects of the educational system, as it helps to nurture connections between people and foster relationships that would otherwise not be there if AI was heavily implemented into educational settings.
AI is not perfect. It cannot write essays about human experience without it being obvious that it was written by a machine. It cannot properly help people grow as people and become better. AI does not have the emotional capacity to properly teach.
Even while there are many upsides to AI being used in education.
It is having a more negative effect on the education system with its constant overuse and over reliance.
