Lately, it’s been taking over our lives. Everywhere you go you see it. It’s mentioned in advertisements and companies are constantly trying to introduce it and push it onto their users. It’s used in classrooms but not approved by many teachers. It’s used for social media to get likes and views. Everyday it develops more and more. Some people absolutely love it, while others cannot stand it.
These days it’s not uncommon to hear people laugh and joke about using AI to help with assignments in school. Many students, from middle school to college age use it to help them, do an assignment for them, or write an entire essay for them.
Karen Freeman, an English teacher at SHS says “It’s very obvious when students are using AI, which makes it frustrating.” The most common one used is Chat GPT, which helps immensely with any and every thing. From helping with a difficult math problem to turning an image of your mom into a pizza.
But using AI can affect brain activity. A study from MIT has shown that when it comes to brain activity, those who use AI to help write an essay place last while those who use their own brain power place first.
Another issue is the use of AI to complete assignments and write essays. In the past two years, this has become such a huge issue that teachers have to bring up how they do not tolerate the use of AI on the first day of school when going over the syllabus.
I remember when I was in middle school, AI wasn’t something anyone thought about, even teachers. As of today, in my 10th grade English class, we had a huge essay to write about based on To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This was an honors class, so you would think that most would know better than to use AI.
Surprisingly enough, our teacher had to lecture our class after she had read over and graded all of our essays, talking about how disappointed she was that some of us had used AI. Alongside my old teacher, Freeman agrees. “I try to tell students that my job is to help them improve and I can’t do that if they know everything, right?”
Even using AI to help with assignments is risky. I’m sure most people know that the information AI gives out isn’t always accurate and could actually be false most of the time. If it draws data from a source that is inaccurate, then the information it gives to the recipient will be inaccurate.
For those of you who rely heavily on AI to complete assignments, you’re probably better off just doing a Google search.
When asking people in my classes who uses AI and who doesn’t, more people said they didn’t use AI. For those who do use AI, their reasoning was understandable and made sense such as it “saves time”, or “it helps make the assignment easy to complete”.
Yes, using AI is a shortcut to get the answers you need in order to get a good grade on an assignment, but are you even learning? Kendi Zacherl, the psychology teacher here at SHS explains “People that use AI are going down the tract where they’re finding it difficult to do anything on their own.”
What is one meant to do when they get into the workforce and realize they know little to nothing about their profession because they relied on AI? Zacherl said “If you are just putting every math problem, every English question, everything into it, you’re not getting the skills to [be an adult].”
Yes, AI has some benefits, but when something has so many cons that they outweigh the pros, is it really worth using it?
