With the growth and popularity of AI spreading like wildfire, it’s important to remind ourselves of the importance of forcing ourselves to sit and digest the information in front of us instead of opting for it to be fed to us by a machine
Part of what makes learning and education worth while is the information you are able to retain when you are truly working at it and reading each and every line, or watching each and every second of an educational video. AI unfortunately has made those processes, as grueling as they can be at times, a hell of a lot easier. But as my parents have always said “If you take the hard road now, you get the easy road later. Easy road now, means hard road later”.
There are, of course, the glaring cons to AI, such as the ethical debate on whether or not it is cheating if students use AI in their work, or the fact that having a tool makes everything easy for us causes us to rely heavily on technology, maybe more so than we should. AI also strips away that teacher-student relationship that could be built since students opt to ask ChatGPT instead of their professors/teachers. In my humble opinion, if our education system focuses more on the substance of its content, and allows teachers/professors to incorporate their own creativity into their coursework, I think the fear of students heavily relying on AI would diminish
One of the largest cons I can write about is that since AI is so accessible, it makes students lazy, and less likely to try and find the solution on their own. Why spend 20 minutes on an assignment when you could spend 2? As you could assume, this process cuts out that learning piece that students are supposed to be doing while doing these assignments, so when test day comes, and AI is not available, students don’t perform well because nothing is being retained.
However, like any tool, it can be used correctly, or incorrectly. AI is a double-edged sword, with the capacity to make information more digestible for students if their professors/teachers are not teaching clearly to students, but it can also lead students down the rabbit hole of finding the shortest path to the answer with little to no learning involved.
In education, teachers and professors should focus on creating an environment for students to truly learn, and maybe even want to learn. AI is never going away, and the odds of getting rid of it completely in education are essentially non-existent. With that being said, what can schools do to slow the curve of students heavily relying on AI? The answer is tricky, but above all else, teachers and professors should NEVER be fully creating their curriculum using AI. If the teachers get lazy, so will the students.
COLLABORATED WITH: Antonia Gretsuk
Sources: https://education.illinois.edu/about/news-events/news/article/2024/10/24/ai-in-schools–pros-and-cons
https://medium.com/@eastgate/10-potential-negative-effects-of-ai-in-education-151634ef3b54