Since the beginning of the decade, Artificial Intelligence has been rapidly advancing and making its way into our everyday lives, in so many different ways. One such way is the classroom. It has changed the way students learn and study, and debates about AI in education have been prevalent since the beginning of this “AI Boom” that we are currently experiencing. Slowly, educators have been embracing AI instead of forbidding it altogether.
In my eyes, with all the negative effects that AI has to offer, this is not a good thing.
To start off, it is quite clear that AI is enabling students to cheat. In my eyes, cheating in schools is inevitable. Many students feel pressured by the weight of their assignments, or their grades, and although I am not condoning the act of cheating, I do sympathize with those that engage in it. Artificial Intelligence has made that already-inevitable cheating way easier, of course, as students can have an entire essay done in seconds. If schools embrace these tools, they are only inadvertently encouraging the act of cheating to students.
To continue, I believe that AI is highly dangerous to a student utilizing it to study, or even “cheat”. Artificial Intelligence programs such as ChatGPT and Gemini are infamous for giving out misinformation. According to the New York Times article “When A.I. Chatbots Hallucinate” by Karen Weise and Cade Metz, generative AI models are trained on vast amounts of internet data, which leads to AI offering a variety of differing information, which may lead to students getting inaccurate and false information.
Furthermore, there are also the general negative effects of artificial intelligence. A major concern of mine is its environmental impact. According to a study by the Washington Post, a single 100-word email generated by ChatGPT-4 requires 519 milliliters of water, little more than a bottle. But this clearly piles up, as one email per year requires 27 liters of water, according to the study. If that still doesn’t seem like that much for what it is, imagine a student body of 1,000 generating one email a week. That’s 27,000 liters of water a year, wasted for something that isn’t a necessity. AI data centers also require a major amount of energy to function, with it coming out of taxpayer dollars and negatively affecting local communities. This high energy consumption also leads to high greenhouse emissions, worsening the already horrible impact that global warming has had on our planet. Further use and therefore advancement of AI is only going to make these consumption issues worse. If schools choose to promote and lean into AI, they are contributing to a serious problem with AI in general.
Of course, there are potential pros to AI use in education. It could help both teachers and students complete their tasks more quickly and efficiently, allowing them to be more productive in their respective roles. It is also understandable to see not adopting artificial intelligence as being “behind”. There are problems to be found with both of these reasons, though. Teachers and students should not compromise quality work in the name of efficiency, and educators should not give in to the societal pressure of “modernity”.
Although it is easy to understand why AI is being slowly adopted into education, students, teachers, and administrators must consider both the education-specific and general problems with AI usage.
