Being a college student can already feel like standing on the precipice of an unknown future of both opportunities and risks. In the modern technological age, rapid advancements make this future even harder to predict, and if any advancements stand to create the largest impact, it may be artificial intelligence (AI).
As with any new technology, society must learn how to adapt, and the growing use and potential of AI is rapidly becoming a universal issue. In academics, it is a hot button topic straddling the line between benevolence and malfeasance.
“I feel like [AI]’s helping us a lot, but some people think that it doesn’t help us to learn,” sophomore engineering student Luis Guzman said. “If you use it the right way I think you can get a bunch of uses for it.”
The entrance of AI into college coursework has resulted in varying policies between individual colleges and individual professors. Elizabethtown College professors are no exception having variously prohibited or approved AI use albeit with strict guardrails.
“I have had a professor tell me that it’s okay to use generative AI to create a study guide for me for an exam and I’ve used that and it’s given me good examples,” junior biology student Luke Fischer said. “But my only worry is that generative AI grabs information from all sources and not just stuff that we learn about in class. A lot of times I found myself going off topic and getting distracted.”
One popular critique of AI is its use as a cheating device when applied to writing assignments, but some students see benefit of using AI as a tool and not for deceitful purposes, such as Fischer’s study guides.
“If it would smooth out the process of learning certain things, if it provided a different way for me to learn about a topic, and it worked better for me, I would have no opposition to that,” Matthew Stizza, another junior biology student, said.
The solution to ensuring academic honesty may lie in the adaptation of collegiate studies to work around the abuse of AI.
“I think tests should be a larger portion of our grade, not assignments. What percentage of our student population is using [AI] to [falsify work]?” Stizza said. “I think using it to cheat is definitely an issue. It’s definitely something you have to work around as a professor nowadays.”
Drawbacks like forgery and academic dishonesty are not lost on some students with regards to AI.
“I think ChatGPT is one of those things where the harm outweighs the good, but there’s nothing that’s going to stop people from using it,” first-year engineering student Will Medley said. “There’s a fine line between plagiarism and using it to be helpful that I think a lot of students will cross.”
Beyond the classroom and after graduation, AI represents an unknown peril for recent graduates looking for entry level jobs that are being snuffed out by AI usage.
“AI is taking a bunch of jobs, but maybe as an engineer you can find a way, maybe you’ll do programming. Maybe it won’t take that job but some of them yeah,” Guzman said. “I’m not really that afraid. At the end of the day, AI is part of engineering so you can work with AI, and it won’t be a problem.”
Perhaps AI won’t eliminate human labor but using it in place of critical thinking or simple brain power, known as “cognitive offloading,” is yet another concern.
“I don’t think people are going to be replaced because AI can’t make up its own ideas like how people can,” Fischer said. “But a concern I have is that people aren’t developing good study tools and they’re not actively reading, which is important for knowledge.”
