We all have our own opinions about artificial intelligence. AI could make or break society. On one hand, AI can be used to make difficult tasks easier and make complex concepts easier to understand. On the other hand, it can be used to replace tasks and skills that students enjoy doing, and it will increasingly become harder to tell whether something is AI-generated or not. AI can often be misused, which has more to do with people who use it, but AI itself has its own dangers that I’m not so sure are worth all the advantages.
According to Sciencing, a study was published in PLOS One, where researchers posed as university students and tested whether AI-generated essays could be detected by submitting essays that were fully AI-generated into examination systems at a United Kingdom psychology program.
Ninety-four percent of those submissions went undetected, revealing how difficult it is to detect when AI is being used. There’s no reason for instructors to accuse students of using AI to cheat, but there’s also no reason for them to assume they didn’t, which I feel like puts everyone on edge.
Imagine working for weeks on an animation or a drawing, and AI is generating those things within seconds. Or you put a lot of work into an essay for school, and it gets falsely flagged for being AI. AI technology makes mistakes because it was made by humans, and it’s hard to imagine why we put so much faith into it if we already know it makes mistakes.
It can easily be argued that AI is there to guide and assist, and humans are using it to solve problems or help them in school, but even just using AI for assistance can undermine critical thinking and diminish creativity, especially for students.
Not to mention, AI can produce human-like responses without ever retaining human creativity. It doesn’t have the ability to genuinely reflect or create that sense of realistic problem solving that humans have.
An article on The Harvard Gazette website states that learning does not occur unless you are actively engaging in what you’re trying to learn, which is why using AI to give you answers will not help you in the long run and completing the assignment is not the ultimate goal. But the article also states that while AI can be helpful in ways in terms of learning, relying on it too much may diminish critical thinking skills.
Think about the last time you were given an assignment you didn’t completely understand the logistics of. Asking for assistance would be an obvious course of action. But once you receive an answer, you realize you could’ve come to the same conclusion if you thought about it more. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help, but figuring certain things out is a part of growing up and entering the real world.
With the development of AI, it is getting harder to tell what is real and what is completely AI-generated. According to Blue Square Alliance, all it takes is a simple text prompt that can generate convincing fabrications. The spread of misinformation is now “faster, cheaper and more accessible.”
AI creates dramatic imagery that people believe more than the truth because it gets their attention, and fact checkers are too slow to respond to it before it gets out to the wider audience. People post and share it until people start to doubt the truth.
Additionally, since AI was made by humans, it makes mistakes. It’s not a perfect system, so there is no telling whether something is true or not unless you fact-check it first.
Once again, think about an assignment you once had that you didn’t understand. Say you did consult AI to help you figure it out or help you understand something. Did you automatically trust it? Or did you immediately fact-check it? AI can be wrong sometimes when it comes to answering simple questions, and it can go so far as to make people doubt what is real and what is fake, and we often believe whatever is more dramatic and too crazy to be true.
Of course, there are people out there who are spreading disinformation for no real reason other than to cause chaos, which is an issue all on its own, but the fact that we are even able to use AI for this purpose shows just how much of a weapon it can be.
AI companies need human-generated content to train their models, so they do so without getting permission from the copyright owners. As copyright owners, you can imagine how frustrating it can be to have your work stolen.
According to CNET, several lawsuits have been filed against AI-tech companies with claims that they violated copyright law and used their content without permission. At that point, their only hope is to claim that training their AI models using copyrighted content is fair use, so it would allow them to continue using copyrighted content without permission, which is not only frustrating but also a privacy concern.
If you have ever posted something online or taken a photo, you are a copyright owner. Think about the feeling of creating something new, something you are very proud of, and posting it so that you can share that experience with others and allow them to see things from your audience.
How would you feel if the thing you created was stolen and used for a different purpose than it was created for without your consent? I think we all just learn to grow protective over what we create because we offer a piece of ourselves into our creations.
The point of this isn’t necessarily to discourage the use of AI. While I don’t like the idea of relying on it, I don’t believe this will make everyone doubt the usefulness of AI. However, if AI is truly expected to be with us and more developed in the future, all we can do is be more aware and mindful of what AI is truly offering, and it’s that doubt that directly leads to more careful decisions.
