Are you in touch with today’s reality? If you are, you may know how much our artificial intelligence has grown to affect our youth’s academic growth by using various AI chatbots such as Chat GPT, Character AI, Meta AI, and tons more. If you’re not so familiar with the new generation of bots, get ready to dive into this.
As most of us know, AI has grown and is still growing in substantial ways that affect student growth in both positive and negative ways. Some may say AI is a helpful source to use when researching various topics and asking various diverse questions that may not be easily obtainable through the internet. Where others may say AI is damaging student academic growth by denying students critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Many other problems can arise with the constant use of AI such as the spread of false information, and even loss of any social skills because since the AI is a bot, it lacks human emotion. Because of these problems, some schools are considering or have already issued a ban on all AI chatbots.
Even with some issues, AI can still be helpful to students. Some claim that AI is one of the best, easiest, and fastest ways to get information for your work, even when it’s not as reliable as other sources may be. A survey study that took place in 2023 by the Walton Family Foundation has shown that “75% of students believe ChatGPT can help them learn faster and 73% of teachers agree.” This is proven as when a bot is asked a question about a topic, it can be asked more follow-up questions if you are confused about anything. From this information, we can see that AI can also be a tutor to students. Knowing this, we should also be careful with the information we gain from using AI because it’s not always accurate, so we should always be sure to fact-check. AI can be a helpful tool, but we should always know that even robots can make mistakes.
As helpful as AI can be, some students use that power for a quick grade by having AI write their essays. Not just giving a little tip on how to write their essays, but having the AI generate a whole essay on a specific topic. Because of this, many teachers are using bot detectors when grading student essays and these detectors can sometimes be incorrect, causing some students to get into trouble. I for one have experienced this problem. I had to write an essay about the history of pizza for my culinary class because I missed my pizza cooking lab. I had the whole day to research and write before its due date, which was midnight. I had to look through many articles to get the gist of what I was going to write and got right to work. I got 4 short paragraphs done and turned it in expecting a decent grade. About a week later I checked my grades and found that I got 10/30 in my cooking essay. “Write a paragraph in your own words without using AI,” was the comment on the assignment. In shock, I immediately emailed my teacher assuring her that I was in fact not using AI while writing my essay. A day later, she had fixed my grade. Happy ending, but to know how much AI has grown to the point where students can get falsely accused is a concern.
As we can see, artificial intelligence chatbots can be both practical and nonpractical. AI can help us with our studies but can also put students in an academic decline, as well as a decline in academic growth and social skills if used too much. AI should be acceptable at times, but there should be a limit to its use when working with schools to ensure that it can be used effectively in a school environment.
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Photo Source: https://edtechteacher.org/making-sense-of-ai chatgpt-in-education/
