The Unstoppable Force Of AI

You have been living under a rock if you haven’t heard anything about AI or ChatGPT. From Snapchat releasing an AI “personal assistant” to entire essays written by ChatGPT, AI is creeping into our lives — whether we like it or not.

I think I speak for a lot of students when I say that most of us have dabbled in AI or ChatGPT to help us with answers. This may be based in curiosity or laziness, but either way, it’s not really productive for our learning. Unlike some students who are excited about easier ways to complete assignments, many teachers are fretting over what the future of AI means in terms of how it will affect teaching and assignments.

“With AI, I can no longer assign essays to be done at home,” says English teacher Mrs. Ashley Wake. “Now students get a prompt, and they have to turn everything into me by the end of the class period. I collect it, then I redistribute it the next time we meet, then I recollect it again. This takes up a good chunk of our instructional time.”

AI has caused a lot of distrust of students from teachers about plagiarizing and cheating on assignments, and although there are ways to try and prevent it, it’s still going to occur.

But fellow CB liberal arts teacher Mr. Larry Reel ’91, takes a more forward standpoint than most teachers sharing,

“If we eliminate it, we are pretending its not really there. I think in school when things are a threat to the status quo, that’s where people just want to ban it, but then it just bubbles under the surface for a while which always has negative outcomes,” he says. “I am not trying to really ban it, but instead I’m trying to figure out ways that I can bring it in to use it and that is very hard.”

Not only is the emergence of AI affecting schools, but it’s affecting all aspects of our society. Mrs. Wake passionately shares her fears about the effects AI will have on humans. “When I think about humans on the food chain, our skin is soft and easily punctured — we have no natural weapons of our own on our body. But what we do have is our wonderful big brain that gives us the ability to collaborate, so when we take away the need for us to engage our brain, we become significantly weaker as a species.”

The future of AI is unknown and ultimately scary. No other generation has had to deal with a self thinking robot. So while we are just starting to explore the world, this fast growing technology is frightening and foreign, causing fear in the future of our humanity and society.

Mrs. Wake offers some well needed advice and warning for our fearful generation. “I worry about technology so advanced that it takes away your need to think or respond appropriately. I challenge students to not fall into the trap and to think for themselves, because at the end of day, you guys are the next leaders, and I don’t want a leader who can’t formulate thoughts because a computer does it for them — that is terrifying.”

You may think teachers are just being annoying for actually making you do the assignments and write your own essays, but they do this for a reason,

“I think that exercising your brain and doing these feats of essays and timed writes and discussion questions and Socratic seminars feels like pulling teeth for you guys, but it’s so beneficial,” Mrs. Wake says. “Just like we go to the gym to get swole, we go to class to work and engage our brain and for it to get larger. This is so that when we come across those great world issues, we are here and prepared. If we could Google the world’s problems, they would already be solved. Computers cannot solve it for us. And while they may help us, this might be an instance where they hurt us.”

Using AI and ChatGPT may be the easy way out of assignments or writing essays, but it won’t help you in the long run. Listen to the warnings and don’t take the easy way out. Don’t let the robots win.