SuppliedArtificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. In the academic world, every professor has addressed the use of AI in the classroom. And no one can blame them — students everywhere are using generative AI to cheat their way into an A grade. Amanda Hoover has pointed out that students in high school and post-secondary are writing tens of thousands of AI generated papers. Yet, there has been little to no talk of how to use AI in a beneficial way in the classroom. If the conversation can shift to how people can use AI as a tool instead of an easy solution in the academic world, then maybe it won’t scare us nearly half as much.
When students use AI as a quick fix, they gain no further understanding of the subject in question. And whatever grade that AI-generated paper receives is not earned or deserved. Every student in post-secondary knows this is cheating by now. On the other hand, what it looks like to use AI as a tool is a bit more unclear. The lack of constructive conversation around this doesn’t help make that any clearer.
I have found — like many philosophy majors — that philosophical texts can be very difficult to understand. On many occasions I have read a single text several times to get the right idea. But to help gain a better understanding, you could give the text to an AI and ask it to give you the key points. You can also ask for page numbers so you can go back and reread specific sections that highlight the argument being made. Alternatively, you could ask AI to read the text for you and only read what it has to say without putting in any effort to understand the text. But this wouldn’t help you better your understanding of the subject.
You can even use AI to help you find problems with the essay you’re writing. But instead of asking the AI to make the changes for you, you should be doing it yourself. This can help you start to recognize recurring issues. But you’ll be finding the solutions yourself, which is a key part of learning how to improve a skill.
I personally used to be very weary of using AI in any context. I always assumed it’d make me a worse writer or I’d get lazy and use it to cut corners. This, however, has not been the case and doesn’t have to be for anyone else.
There are always two sides to the story. Knowing that AI isn’t going anywhere means knowing that we must find ways in which it can benefit us. Having AI do everything for us isn’t really all that beneficial, but learning to use it constructively can be helpful. I’ll admit, it’s a very fine balance. At the end of the day AI will still be used by students to cheat, but demonizing AI won’t do any good for anyone.
While there are a lot of ways that AI can be problematic for academic environments, it doesn’t have to be. If we can talk about how to responsibly and constructively use AI, it’s very possible AI can be beneficial. Otherwise it’ll remain a looming presence. Where it starts, though, is having conversations about how to fix the problems.
