The Value of Education in the World of Generative AI

Within the last few years, we have seen a meteoric rise in the use of generative AI, but that is not necessarily a good thing. People are rapidly becoming less self-sufficient, particularly students.

AI use in academia is unprecedented and rapidly expanding as more and more students turn to generative AI sites like ChatGPT to help them with every aspect of their education. And they are doing themselves a huge disservice. No longer are students really engaging with their schoolwork. Instead, they pass off the heavy lifting to a computer. They have a book to read? Just have ChatGPT summarize it in one to two easily digestible paragraphs. It certainly makes the work easier, but when you offload the heavy lifting of your assignments to a computer, what are you actually learning?

Now, I was a student not too long ago and I still remember the pressure I felt to perform well academically. It’s a crushing, all-consuming pressure that invades every facet of your life as a student. So, I understand why students are turning to generative AI to help them through their schoolwork. Assuaging the fear of failure is a very alluring prospect. But using generative AI for every assignment is robbing students of the real value of education.

The purpose of education, outside of teaching you the material, is to teach you how to think critically and analytically, to teach you to see the hidden meaning of the media that you engage with. It also teaches you to have a healthy degree of skepticism about the information you are presented with in your day-to-day life, which opens up the possibility of progress and change. Humanity’s greatest achievements have come from questioning the status quo, and education provides you with the tools to do so.

Highschool gives you a good foundation for this, and college is where you sharpen and hone your abilities. But so many college students rely on AI.

According to an article published by The Guardian, in the 2023–2024 academic year 0.51% of students in the UK have been proven to have cheated with AI, a 218.75% increase from the previous year. Now, 0.51% may not seem like a lot, but that’s only the number of proven cases. In the same article, Dr. Peter Scarfe of the University of Reading talks about how proving AI use is nearly impossible, so, the actual number is, realistically, much higher.

AI usage in college has become so rampant that we are seeing the return of blue books to combat the spike in academic dishonesty and ensure that students are actually engaging with the material they are taught. But is completely banning AI going too far?

ChatGPT reminds me of a calculator. Not it terms of its functionality, but more so its place in academia. We all remember being told we couldn’t use calculators on a test because we wouldn’t just be walking around with calculators in our pockets and look at us now. Banning AI completely feels extreme. After all, most students will utilize AI in their future careers, so it is important they learn to use AI.

Of course, to successfully use a calculator you still have to understand the fundamentals of math, from the order of operations to different formulas, and the same could be said about AI. It requires a certain base level of knowledge to wield AI efficiently. You can just plug in a random question and ChatGPT will give you an answer but knowing how to pose a question and using the answers to actually learn is crucial. Instead of having ChatGPT write your entire essay for you, you can instead use it to help you find and compile sources and even summarize the sources to help streamline the essay writing process without taking away your chance to learn how to research.

AI is a tool that we can use to make our jobs and lives easier, but like with all tools, you must know the basics to be able to use it effectively. That is why it is still so important to take education seriously. After all, a tool is only as useful as the skill of the person wielding it.