There’s a good chance you use artificial intelligence (AI) on a daily basis, and if you don’t now, you likely will in the very near future. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, we now regularly use tools like Chat GPT to help us attain information, solve problems, and even write college essays (gulp!). In fact, right now AI is taking over college campuses at lightning speed, with increasingly more college students by the hour turning to AI to “help” with papers, projects, presentations, and exams (“help” in this example = do all the work). Things have changed so quickly that colleges can barely keep up, with more and more professors realizing that there are not enough tech-tools available to catch plagiarism, and even if there were, there are not enough hours in the day to confront every student who turns in AI completed work. The result? We are witnessing a huge paradigm shift right now, where attaining AI information is the end goal, and critical thinking and studying (challenging things to do!) are merely antiquated ways of learning information (double gulp!).
What happens when we no longer use critical thinking?
If you have yet to try Chat GPT or similar AI, you should soon make time to do so. While still occasionally wonky, AI has come a long way in a short period of time, and that is as much beneficial as it is worrisome. As AI continues to improve with both accuracy and efficiency, we more rely on AI for everything, from writing college papers to laying out your family financials. Input prompt, output answer. No thinking involved. That’s really great, right?! Right?!
Finding better ways to do things in life is generally worth examining, but the questions surrounding AI go much deeper than that. AI may be amazing at quickly answering your questions, but how useful is that information if you have no idea where it was found, if it is credible, and what errors might exist with the answer provided? For example, increasingly more students that I see at my office talk openly about how they use AI to write their college essays — I’m talking literally copy-and-paste. Usually these papers are well written, with few, if any, grammatical errors. Students turn in the AI paper, professors/teachers assign a superior grade, and everyone moves forward to the next class. What is lost here is that in many cases the student has learned literally nothing! In examples like this, students aren’t developing the real world skills they will need in their future careers — whether that means building bridges, filing taxes, or performing medical surgeries. With no real knowledge acquired, or critical thinking used, we will soon be sending out to jobs the most unequipped cohort of people in modern times — and that’s not hyperbole.
And if you think this kind of academic approach is only being used by struggling students, I can tell you firsthand that almost every student I talk to about AI — ranging from straight A’s to struggling grades — regularly turn to AI to do their work. Read that again, even the top-notch scholars are increasingly cutting corners with AI.
What are the future consequences that await when we are no longer able to critically think for ourselves? When we can’t problem solve without the use of Chat GPT? When we can’t write, do math problems, or figure out any other academic or life challenge on our own without AI? There is a very dear price to pay if this trend continues, and in this moment there does not appear to be any real push-back. Academically, what can schools and universities do when seemingly everyone is cheating? One response we have seen is more schools allowing for a percentage of student work to be “AI generated,” essentially meeting students halfway, knowing they will use AI anyway. Sure, that approach is better than simply looking the other way when AI-student papers are turned in, but is that the long-term answer? Teachers and professors have their own tools to help identify plagiarized papers, but with so much artificial intelligence cheating occurring where will these educators find the time to meet, discuss, document, and implement individual consequences for those students who are caught turning in AI work? There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to respond in this fashion to a problem this prevalent.
Final thoughts
I don’t know that anyone has the answer for how to keep AI in check so that we can continue to use our human critical thinking to solve problems. Why learn basic math when you can just ask AI? Why research a paper and learn about a subject when you can just have AI pump out your paper? Why try, when you really don’t have to?? There will be real consequences for our future if we continue to work like this, consequences that go far beyond a grade in a class. We desperately need to continually develop our critical thinking, not abandon it in exchange for quick, AI answers.
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