The emergence of any developing, powerful, and omnipresent technology sparks discourse and advocates regulation. With the evolution of such a distinct technology as AI, a technology that has already seamlessly woven itself into so many parts of our lives, unforeseen consequences may already be upon us. AI seems to simplify lives, but at what cost?
Listen, I don’t see us getting full Age of Ultron, where AI aims to cleanse the world of what it computes its survival needs (elimination of humans), or at least I have no rational reason to think so… but… for this blog post’s sake, let’s consider an environment similar to what the current generation has experienced with the dawn of smartphones, social media, and general digitalization. Let’s consider the next generation that effortlessly integrates and takes full advantage of the tool.
An uproar of AI use, may sever more humanity and individuality than social media already has. A recent study exploring the impact on decision-making and laziness in education found that dependency on the homework-time-reducing tool saw significant negative changes in all dependent variables.
Now is this enough to say that AI makes us lazy and indecisive?
No, of course not, its context and experimental conditions make the insight subjective. Nonetheless, the intuition that if we continually rely on a software that reduces our opportunities to be productive, make decisions, and perform critical thinking, now that is something we should hold on to.
The otherside of the coin ought to be explored. AI is an amazing innovation that augments efficiency, provides varying perspectives, and continually improves. Wanting to abstain is almost as big of a fallacy as creating a dependency. It is the relationship with the tool that requires immediate and extensive attention.
References:
Ahmad, S. F., Han, H., Alam, M. M., Rehmat, M., Irshad, M., Arraño-Muñoz, M., & Ariza-Montes, A. (2023). Impact of artificial intelligence on human loss in decision making, laziness and safety in education. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), 1-14.
Vox. (2024). We’re already using AI more than we realize. [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsZ-lx_3eoM
Zhang, S., Zhao, X., Zhou, T., & Kim, J. H. (2024). Do you have AI dependency? The roles of academic self-efficacy, academic stress, and performance expectations on problematic AI usage behavior. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 21(1), 34.
Interesting blog post Justus. I think that a lot of students at our university have taken the use AI to an extreme. You see that some students use ChatGPT to generate a complete assignment for their courses or use AI tools to find relevant articles for their Master thesis. There were even cases where students used non-existing references for their thesis, all generated by AI. This makes me really wonder what effects AI has on creative institutions like our university. Like you said, does it reduce our critical thinking? As a university, prohibiting tools like ChatGPT does not work, but I believe that AI can have a reduced long-term effect on productivity and creativity, if the university does not find a way to regulate the use of AI.
I personally think that the concerns are exaggerated, with every major technology there has always been pushback that it would limit human thinking. Examples would be calculators, GPS, and of course search engines, the newest addition of LLMs are just another tool in a long line of new technologies. Regulations when it comes to using AI in education to prevent the erosion of critical thinking doesn’t seem very plausible to me, as the models are continually evolving and the detection software isn’t what I’d call reliable. I think that how education is approached is going to fundamentally changed because of this technology, likely in class participation is going to become a more vital part of your grades.