As we more regularly use artificial intelligence (AI) on a daily basis, we enjoy the benefits, but often overlook the negative consequences that come with AI. While AI might be useful at showing you what your house would look like painted a new color, or how to change the oil in your car, important questions arise when examining how AI is currently being used in academic settings (particularly colleges and universities) around the world today. In fact, just this week NPR published a column specifically about the current AI conundrum in higher education, with specific questions about how AI should be used properly, and the direct impact AI is having on learning when students literally “cut-and-paste” their work rather than actually doing it themselves. If AI is doing the work and students are simply passing along AI processed papers, what — if any — actual learning is taking place? And if minimal learning is occurring, what confidence will you have in the future with engineers who build bridges, doctors who write prescriptions and perform surgeries, and attorneys that represent you in legal cases? As you can see, there are many serious, practical questions around AI happening in this very moment that will have a direct effect on our future with respect to education, learning, and application of knowledge.
Big changes are happening right now
If you went to college before the current AI age, you can immediately recall long hours of studying, attending study groups, meeting tutors, writing and editing papers, and engaging in many more time consuming, laborious actions and behaviors designed to help you make the grade. No, we didn’t have to read caveman drawings scrawled on walls, but we did have to actively participate in the learning experience so that we understood theories, best practices, and valid criticisms relating to the topics we studied. By engaging in the traditional learning process, the active pursuit of knowledge by means of discovery, conversation, and analysis helped students best prepare for the future — but is that still happening today?
Ideally, as the NPR article discusses, AI can be used to supplement learning by means of teaching at different grade levels for better understanding, and clarifying challenging subjects by providing new examples and answering student questions directly. What is happening instead is the opposite of that, where increasingly more students each day passively enter a query, then cut-and-paste the answer back to the professor. While some students might give a quick glance-over of the AI answer to make sure it looks right, many students simply forward the AI answer directly to the professor as they wait for their A+ grade. Would you consider this learning? What confidence would you have in your dentist, accountant, or electrician that got their credentials this way?
If you think this is an over-simplification and over-dramatization of what is happening right now, I challenge you to look more closely. As someone who regularly treats students, as well as teaches college courses, I have these conversations almost daily with individuals who are very candid about the ease and prevalence in which they use AI — and the answers would scare you. In fact, some students have told me that they take as many online courses as possible to get around traditional course hurdles (i.e. proctors for exams) so that they can keep one window open to take an exam, while keeping another window open to search for (cheat) answers. Making things worse, profit-driven universities continue to offer more online courses to increase margins, thereby allowing more students to approach college in this manner.
It should be noted there are many well-intended professors trying to keep things in check, but are essentially handcuffed when trying to help. First, increasingly more universities are allowing for AI, making it tough for professors to know what is and isn’t valid student work. Second, online courses continue to make it incredibly difficult for professors to properly proctor exams. And finally, even if professors could catch every student who cheats with AI plagiarized papers, what would they do about it? There aren’t enough hours in the day for a professor to meet with all the students who would fit into this category, and then consider that they would need to arrange these meeting literally every week. Catching a cheater here and there is one thing, but devoting huge chunks of time each day toward catching AI plagiarists is not in the professor job description, does not contribute toward tenure, and certainly does not help with student-professor evaluations.
Final thoughts
There is certainly a place for AI in society, and there are many good uses of AI in increasingly more settings. Where AI is a major concern, however, is in education and how we are preparing students for the future. When we allow students to freely use AI without consequence, it’s like leaving a bucket of candy out on Halloween and expecting kids to just take one — good luck with that! Students will always look for shortcuts, and universities are ill-equipped to respond to all the threats AI poses in this moment.
drstankovich.com
