Let’s imagine two scenarios that are becoming increasingly more common in schools. A student hands in their seemingly carefully crafted essay. The skeptic teacher asks our student a few questions about the said essay. Poor student, put on the spot, fumbles to provide answers, but the real answer is clear: Mr. or Ms. Student asked AI to write the entire paper, and received a zero as their grade.
Now, say that a student really did write a very well-worded and impressive essay but didn’t use AI at all. Instead, the teacher has automated grading with the help of a handy-dandy AI agent, and this agent mistakenly grades the student’s paper as a zero after misinterpreting the provided grading rubric. After going through all the troubles of proving their innocence and back-and-forth with the teacher, the student finally gets the A they deserved. So much that could have been avoided had the teacher read through themselves.
Both scenarios have happened before, and they’re the result of a troubling new trend inside the field of Education. More and more people are seeing the potential to offload work onto AI, instead of doing it themselves. The temptation is an attractive one, too. Why spend hours on an assignment that Gemini can do for you in seconds? Why waste time solving complex equations when ChatGPT can answer it for you?
It would seem as if the prospect of gaining back the time one might otherwise have devoted to tedious and boring tasks outweighs the negative repercussions, right? Well, it might depend on what you see these repercussions as. If the only downside of using AI to replace your work is the potential to get caught, you might be missing something.
Getting caught is hardly the only consequence, nor is it the worst. The true danger is the normalization of outsourcing the cognitive process that so much of education works to build. We’re all taught what 3+3 is in elementary school. We’re also taught what 5+5 is, or 2+2. However, knowing what these numbers add up to isn’t the same as learning the process of addition, how one is to take any two numbers, and through a process get the sum of the numbers. Addition, i.e. the processes and systems we use to be able to deduce answers instead of remembering them, is the more important part of learning.
An example that might serve well is the calculator. For most elementary mathematics, the use of a calculator is not allowed. That is because the intent behind being taught the elementary math is to be able to work out these problems on your own, instead of just knowing the answers, hence the notorious “word problem.” Yet in higher grades, one is much more likely to find a calculator in the classroom. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 3% of 4th graders were allowed to use calculators freely. While for 8th graders, that number is close to 20%.
As it is increasingly likely in the higher grade levels that students possess the capability to work out problems on their own, they are given access to calculators as problems get more complex. The calculator is not outright banned in schools, but its usage is typically only allowed if the task or assignment merits it.
Calculators are reserved for mathematics and sometimes sciences, but AI encompasses every subject. How do we ensure that AI isn’t being used to provide cheap creativity in our schools of photography and design? To combat the improper use of AI, each field of study needs their own personalized approach, instead of blanket bans and generalized rules.
The approach to AI might be different for the social sciences than it would be for a composition class, and that’s good. Tools should be used in accordance with the work that merits their application, and that’s what AI is: a tool.
The danger presented by improper moderation of AI in schools, colleges, and universities across the world isn’t that AI is remembering the answers to the problem for us, it’s that it’s solving them for us. The critical thinking that goes along with completing assignments is often the most tedious part, but it is so crucial to keep this aspect inside the fold of humanity. The ability to think critically, to think deeply and creatively is what helps us to interact with the world around us and should not be lost to AI.
“Once men began to turn over their thinking to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” This quote is from Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, and it provides the scenario we ought to be working hard to protect against, the replacement of human thinking with that of machines.
So it is especially in these environments, the classrooms and the campuses, that we must have the correct view of AI. It is in the schools that our capacity for reasoning and creative thinking is most expounded upon and should be protected from the danger of being subsidized to an AI for convenience.
Cooperation from both students and faculty is necessary if we want to construct an AI moderation framework that works best for everyone. It would be impossible, even unneeded, to ban AI entirely, because it does have an enormous potential to be beneficial. Maybe a student needs to pull a quick bio of an author, AI would provide that information the same as a search engine might, and we didn’t ban google.
The emphasis is on how the AI is being used, not if. In education, the idea is to make students more capable, to prepare them for life after the schoolyard. Does it make students more capable by allowing them to subsidize their own work to that of a large-language model? It would hardly be right to call the work of an AI the work of a student. Without implementing a proper policy on AI in the classroom, we fear that students will walk away with degrees that were earned by machines.