Believe it or not, you have felt the effect of artificial intelligence somewhere in your day-to-day life. From chatbots on your phone, assistants in your home, or programs to write entire papers for you, AI or artificial iIntelligence is everywhere.
Since artificial intelligence has so many uses, people have not stopped coming up with ideas for how it can improve life to make it easier and better. Many of these ways can pertain to the use of artificial intelligence in the education of students. One way that has the potential to impact students most heavily is the use of chatbots such as CatGPT by OpenAI or Textero-AI by Tracxn to write essays or papers. The majority of the time, these creative Artificial Intelligence writing programs are very successful and produce quality essays with information pulled from several sources. The problem comes down to students doing next to no work, not creating original work, but being given the grade and the credit to reflect as if they did the work.
Some of you may be asking, so what’s the problem? The problem comes when looking at the idea of plagiarism. Plagiarism is installed as an unwavering rule in schools not just to protect past writers from having their work stolen, but also keep student’s creativity levels high and keep them thinking about how they can create original ideas. When the paper is written for them and is not their own work, the process of learning the material and demonstrating knowledge is diminished; the practice of creating something new and original is also eliminated.
The influence of Artificial intelligence has reached so far that it even reaches the other side of education. “Some teachers are even using Artificial Intelligence to write letters of recommendation,” said ELA teacher Darcy Stanco. “It’s just a different tool.” This shows that even teachers are finding uses for essay writing AIs and their softwares.
But it has come to the point where education about Artificial Intelligence is necessary. In Colorado Mesa University English 111, a college level class offered to high school students who qualify, , one of the first assignments of the class in the first semester of the year is a class discussion about the uses and ethical basis to artificial intelligence and its use in the education system. The students from this class mostly agreed that artificial intelligence can be used in the classroom, but it should be done correctly. The agreement resulting from the discussion also showed that students are already aware of the use of Artificial Intelligence in the classroom, both in secondary and higher education.
The textbook which is a required reading for this same class “Everything’s An Argument” by Andrea A .Lunsford, John J.Ruszkiewicz, and Keith Walters also discusses Artificial Intelligence and its overall use in the college setting, stating that most students have used an Artificial Intelligence writing bot in the past and or plan to use on in the future. This further shows the realization that Artificial Intelligence is becoming and has already become a large part of our lives, even as students.
One of the greatest technological developments of human history is the creation of something which can simulate conversation and respond accordingly to inquiries it is given. While artificial intelligence has not yet reached its full potential, it is getting better and better every day. It is something which surrounds us and is used frequently in several aspects of our day-to-day life
