Opinion: Don’t normalize AI in school. It depletes your degree’s worth.
Our columnist laments how the current love affair with artificial intelligence kills college students’ productivity and fuels laziness. With the growing concern of jobs taken by AI, we must recognize our over-dependence on the tool. Leonardo Eriman | Photo Editor
Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.
For a generation supposedly fueled by activism, all care seems to fly out the window when artificial intelligence is the subject at hand. In exchange for shorter homework hours and easier A’s, Gen Z’s usage of programs like ChatGPT and generative AI in college is only increasing.
AI has become inherent to our social media, advertisements, Google queries and even a recent issue of Vogue Magazine. Growing inescapable, new statistics show that although younger generations insist on our parents being the butt of the technological joke, we’re the ones who should be laughed at.
Scientists’ warnings against AI’s irreversible impacts on the environment and our brains don’t seem to be holding their ground well in an increasingly anti-intellectual time.
Opting for the easier way out is just, well, easier.
AI is perpetuating students’ unwillingness to do any of their coursework. In fact, recent studies show that around 86% of university students use AI in their coursework. This uptick in AI usage, in fact, comes with a parallel upsurge in student laziness and a lack of learning.
Recent MIT studies find that ChatGPT may be chipping away at our critical thinking and analytical skills, stating that out of the three groups they studied, the one that used AI had the lowest brain engagement.
The most horrifying aspect of the rise of AI usage in universities isn’t just students’ willingness to destroy the only planet we have in exchange for ease – it’s our own willingness to destroy our minds and give away our intellectual properties to robots.
We pay thousands of dollars every year to a university, and yet more of my friends than I can count are throwing away the classes they’re paying to attend by using AI for coursework.
When you ask ChatGPT a simple question instead of researching it yourself or trusting your class notes, you’re feeding a bot being developed to take over many of our future jobs. Moreover, you’re uselessly wasting environmental energy on a task you could have used your brain to complete.
To put it simply, using AI as a university student is absurd and goes against every real reason to spend so much time and money on higher education.
We attend college to further our careers, goals and academic dreams. Yet, in recent years, all of those aspirations seem to have been pushed to the side in the name of AI’s ease.
Just because something is easy doesn’t mean it is right.
As AI continues to grow in our daily lives, search engines implement it as a regular tool and generative filters become inescapable, it’s important for college students to stay mindful of where they’re putting their energy.
When we forfeit our right to learn and grow in the name of laziness, we rebuke all of the privileges that come with a higher education. We’re slowly diminishing our minds and creativity by eroding them through the use of AI instead of preparing ourselves for the futures we’re fighting for in the first place.
We’ve become so used to comfort that the mere prospect of work — even something as routine as a college essay — is being handed over to robots.
Gen Z worries about their jobs being taken over by AI, then copies entire essays into ChatGPT for a grade that seems costless but really comes at the expense of all of their ideas and original thoughts.
Gen Z wants to change the world, but can’t even put in the work to understand what’s around them. It’s juxtaposing to be working toward a degree while not doing any actual work at all.
If you can’t bring yourself to understand the environmental implications of AI, you can at least realize how your intellectual property is being stolen through its use.
With our phones already damaging our attention spans and minds, what reason is there to further our deterioration by opting to use AI?
This semester, when you consider using ChatGPT, contemplate what good college tuition is doing for you in the long run, and what good your degree will do if you weren’t actually the one to earn it.
Dayna Roberts is a junior majoring in creative writing. She can be reached at dbrobert@syr.edu.
