Op-Ed: Will Artificial Intelligence Change Schools Forever?
Artificial intelligence tools have surged in popularity among students for their ability to complete schoolwork.
Over winter break, I started hearing about Artificial Intelligence that can answer questions and write essays with the click of a button. This raises the question; will students utilize this resource to complete essays and homework for school projects? After all, these AIs can produce original content gathered from public sources.
On December 7, the BBC wrote that over 1 million people had used ChatGPT in less than a week. This explosion in popularity has ushered in a new era of AI chatbots. Also, many people have seen this opportunity to invest money into ChatGPT.
As reported in the BBC, “Microsoft has announced a multi-year, multibillion-dollar investment in AI as it extends its partnership with OpenAI. OpenAI is the creator of the popular image generation tool Dall-E and the chatbot ChatGPT.”
The difficulty about checking if writing was produced by an AI is because many AIs write different content every time you run the program. This makes it harder to pick out a paper written by an AI in a group of papers written by students.
By only writing the topic of your paper, an AI such as Jasper can produce an essay with the option of grade level, tone, and length. Additionally, the writing can be translated into many different languages, such as French, Spanish, and Mandarin.
This could greatly change academic honesty and make it easier for students to get a grammatically correct essay with quotes and references in seconds. If a student chooses to use an AI, they will not be learning the fundamental skills needed to write an excellent paper.
Teachers also must realize that these AIs can write papers for students. When I asked Jasper what teachers can do to limit the use of AIs in a school environment, it said, “One way teachers can limit AI usage is by making sure that students are aware of the potential risks associated with using AI and its implications on privacy, data security, and ethical implications. Educating students on responsible use of AI will help them become more mindful when using AI-driven tools and technologies.”
Some people might be worried about Chatbot AIs replacing human interaction. But, according to the BBC, “Other firms which opened conversational AIs to general use, found they could be persuaded to say offensive or disparaging things.” Because of this, I think that most AIs still need a lot of development in order to mimic human speech patterns.
Overall, the use of AIs in academic work is a complicated issue, and the actions of the School and its educators may decide what the fate of these AIs in a school environment will be.
