The Rise of AI

 By Abijah Hibbert

 As AI becomes more predominant in classrooms, educators are concerned that students are starting to develop an overreliance on AI. Is this overreliance enhancing student learning, or is it destroying essential skills that are needed to succeed?

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content, such as text, images, and music, by mimicking the style and characteristics of its training data. Generative AI recognizes and learns specific patterns to output entirely new content, in contrast to Traditional AI, which is designed to follow a set of predefined rules to perform distinct tasks, such as identifying patterns and making predictions. In recent years, Generative AI has skyrocketed into mainstream popularity, being used by many different companies for promotional purposes as well as by the general public to participate in trends on social media that require specific prompts to generate images. Generative AI is also being used as a way to gain information quickly, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, among other AI tools. 

In an interview with NRHS Social Studies teacher Brett Raboy, he stated, “If we can somehow use AI to reach out to individual students and craft a learning environment suited, particularly to their interests, I think there's a lot of power in that. I definitely do," he said. But we need to train teachers to do that. We need to find AI programs that can do that for us. That, I think, is very interesting and promising for the future.”

The increased use of AI has sparked a debate between students and educators regarding whether AI belongs in educational settings. Students have become overly reliant on AI to assist them with assignments, as well as to complete relatively simple tasks. However, students highlight AI’s advantages in education, claiming that AI can be used to personalize learning by tailoring to individual student needs and learning styles, while also providing students with AI-driven analytics to give insight into student performance. AI has displayed the ability to create and supplement content that is readily accessible to students. With the growing cost of tutors due to high demand and increased living expenses, most students lack the essential funds needed to hire a tutor for multiple hours regularly, leading students to utilize AI in order to understand complex concepts that they may not understand. Using AI as a personal assistant has remained beneficial for students; however, some students begin to realize how powerful AI truly is and may start using AI irresponsibly.

Numerous educators recognize the value of AI and how it has the potential to change education and shape how people learn and consume educational content. The concern arises when talking about academic misconduct, such as cheating and plagiarism. Using AI to write essays and complete assignments, only to present them as your own work, is representative of academic dishonesty. Educators start to warn when students start to depend on AI answers, as it hinders their ability to think critically for themselves, often leaving them with a superficial understanding of the subject. If this continues, it can greatly affect their academic performance. Some studies and educators suggest that students who rely heavily on AI often perform worse on assessments requiring independent thinking and problem-solving. This further allows educators to understand how the use of AI should be properly taught to students and emphasize the importance of being responsible while using it. 

As AI starts to become deeply integrated into education, its advantages are clearly shown, along with its disadvantages. While it’s useful for the personalization of individual students' needs and allows for more accessibility for lower-income students, an overreliance on AI dulls creativity and critical thinking skills, and students’ ever-growing dependency is showcased with declining academic performance. The struggle to find a balance between using AI as a helpful guide or as an excessive servant has become a challenge for both students and teachers. As students continue to depend on artificial intelligence, the question remains: Do students still have the ability to think for themselves?

Sources used:

https://internationalschools.britishcouncil.org/blog/ai-in-education-how-to-navigate-the-opportunities-and-challenges

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11602497

https://nmu.edu/ctl/academic-dishonesty-using-generative-ai

https://education.illinois.edu/about/news-events/news/article/2024/10/24/ai-in-schools--pros-and-cons