Opinion: AI is making us dumber 

Artificial intelligence, which has been steadily developing since the 1950s, is becoming a problem much faster than ever before. And while its potential sounds incredible in theory, in practice, it's cause for alarm. 

Right or wrong, a fair share of today's students are using AI, in one way or another, to complete an assignment. It’s just too convenient. Why spend hours after school writing an essay when you can copy and paste the prompt into ChatGPT and get the finished product in seconds? There are even paraphrasing websites that you can copy and paste the essay into until it passes AI checkers. Absolutely zero energy required, takes about five minutes, and often slips by teachers unnoticed or unchallenged. 

It seems an obvious choice, especially for students balancing difficult courses, extracurriculars, and a job. Only this shortcut eliminates the entire point of taking a challenging class. Challenging yourself intellectually allows you to develop and hone important skills for your future. The ability to problem solve and the work ethic required to sit down and complete a difficult assignment are necessities to succeed later in life. Over-reliance on AI weakens those skills. 

As students become more dependent on AI, original thought will become eclipsed by the code spat out by these models. If every student is using AI to summarize the lessons meant to provoke thought, then there is no more thinking. The novel Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, is read by most DHS students in their sophomore English class. It's a reaction to the over-reliance on technology Bradbury saw in 1950. The first AI model was proposed in the same year. The story warns its audience that when we choose the convenience of technology over the necessity of human thought, we lose our ability to think critically and, therefore, control over our lives. I imagine Bradbury is rolling in his grave over the fact that English literature students all over the world are using AI to summarize his book so they can reuse the same three talking points in their Socratic seminars. 

This cheat code isn’t just about academic integrity; over-reliance on AI can be harmful for cognitive function. The human brain operates in a use it or lose it manner, and the less students use their creativity, problem-solving skills, and critical thinking abilities, the more they lose them, According to an article from the National Institute of Health, AI is encouraging students to disregard individual thinking, even for the simplest of assignments.

If the loss of original thought wasn’t enough to raise red flags, the environmental impact should be. The amount of electricity required to train and use AI models is shocking, and the excessive use of electricity leads to excessive carbon dioxide emissions, which is adding to an already existing problem. On top of that, huge amounts of water are needed to cool the hardware that AI is built on, which often ends up disrupting the local ecosystems from which said water is pulled. 

The computing infrastructure that makes up AI is stored in buildings called "data centers." These are nothing new. The first data center was made in the 1940s to house the first general-purpose digital computer, according to MIT News, but the sharp rise in demand for data centers as homes for AI is becoming an issue. The difference with AI data centers, is that they use a substantially greater amount of energy than most centers, and there is currently no sustainable way to keep up with the power requirements. The amount of energy required not only to train the models, but also to deal with energy fluctuations, and the everyday use of AI, requires fossil fuels to keep up. We already know about the unsustainable use of fossil fuels, and the ever-rising energy requirements will only add to that problem.

So, what can we do? How do we deal with the impacts of AI on our brains and our planet? 

Bluntly put, the everyday person should simply stop using it. You don’t need AI to summarize a 200-word email. You should be able to read at grade level, and you should be able to finish a book for school on your own. And if you can’t, if the assignment is too difficult, reach out to your teacher. It's their job to help you understand what you’re learning and the skills you need to figure things out for yourself. If you don’t have the time, reach out to your teacher, ask for an extension, and explain your circumstances.

 As technology becomes more integrated into our society, we often forget that one of the main functions of society is to help one another. If we bring back the human interaction that we’ve relied on for centuries, we’ll find that many of the problems we use AI for can be just as easily solved by a simple face-to-face conversation.