Not a day passes anymore without discussion around artificial intelligence (AI), with most people still in awe of what AI can do. For subject experts, AI can quickly help gather facts, evidence, and other important information needed to solve problems and help educate others — great examples of how AI can be used in healthy and positive ways. But what about how others are using AI, including increasingly more students? For example, if a student prompts AI to write his paper without any of his personal input, and then the student turns the paper in for an “A” grade, what learning has occurred? Clearly the student has not learned anything, and will not be able to apply “knowledge” that he has not attained. There is a dramatic, clear contrast emerging between how different people interface with AI — experts often use it to enhance and build upon what they already know, while younger people (i.e. students) use AI to simply get their assignments done. Candidly speaking, some use AI in constructive ways, while others plug in input, collect output, and move along their day with no learning at all.
Contrasting how different groups of people use AI
If you have played around with AI, you already know how fun and addicting it can be to use. While not always perfectly accurate, AI can produce information in mere seconds that previously took us hours, days, and weeks to find. This ease and quickness of delivery is incredibly useful to different audiences for different reasons, and herein lies the concern.
When experts use AI to enhance learning, the results are usually very positive. For example, if an auto mechanic plugs in your car’s symptoms into AI and quickly determines the root of your car’s problems, that’s great! Similarly, an attorney who can acquire case studies in half the time saves you money as a client, and a physician using AI to better understand the newest research about a specific health condition might become more efficient in the ways she treats you and your similar symptoms. Business leaders can crank out powerpoint presentations in a fraction of the time they used to, thereby leaving them more time to lead! There are literally countless ways for experts to build on their knowledge base by using AI, allowing them to be more efficient by saving time, energy, and money.
Now onto the bad news — not everybody uses AI in these ways. Perhaps the most concerning setting right now is in education, as young people today now have the most powerful tool ever, and the ability to use AI in exchange for their own thinking whenever they want. Having no (or little) foundation of knowledge before AI to build upon, increasingly more students today are simply typing into AI what they need to turn in to their teacher. “Write me a 1,000 word paper on the extinction of dinosaurs” or “What is the answer to this calculus problem?” or “Summarize the book To Kill a Mockingbird into a presentation I can give the class.” In many cases students come away with the grade they want, but they couldn’t tell you one thing about dinosaur extinction, the calculus problem, or what To Kill a Mockingbird was about. How is this helpful in any meaningful way beyond simply getting an undeserved grade in a class?
Students will always be incentivized and rewarded to make high marks in school, and AI is the fastest way to make the grade (and save time and effort). For younger people who need a grade more than they need the feeling of satisfaction from doing hard, scholarly work, it’s easy to see why more and more students everyday are leaning into AI rather than put in the work. With just a few keystrokes, an entire paper can be written — compare that to the old way of doing things by going to the library, perusing articles, reading those articles, and then synthesizing what was learned into a neat, coherent, grammatically-correct paper. What do you think most student s are going to do? Sure, they might not have a clue relating to the paper they just turned in, but they got the grade — and at this point in their life the grade is a lot more important than developing things like “critical thinking.” What most young people don’t realize is that there will be a day when they need to actually use what they are going to school for, and AI won’t be able to make up for all that lost learning in just a query or two.
Ironically, with experts (defined loosely here as people who have some kind of working knowledge of a topic) AI can be used in amazing, efficient, and helpful ways. The contrast between the student simply needing a paper written, and an expert using AI to save time and be better at his job, could not be more dramatic. Same tool (AI), but used in completely different ways.
Final thoughts
We are currently witnessing a very interesting trend with how different people use artificial intelligence, and their patterns are based on different ages and needs. For established people already having a knowledge base in a specific subject, AI helps with speed, efficiency, and establishing the best practices to do their job. For younger people not yet in their careers, grades are the most important thing, and AI can write papers and complete homework assignments in mere seconds. Whether or not the student understands what he just completed using AI does not seem to matter, only that he got a good grade on the assignment. While it’s relatively easy to see why different people use AI in different ways, it is more than concerning that younger people may be left very unprepared and untrained for the future from using AI solely to make the grade.
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