The idea of a technology we can talk to and understand us and helping with tasks akin to a human, has fascinated humanity for decades. From HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey more than 50 years ago to JARVIS in Iron Man, our imagination has long been filled with intelligent machines assisting or even surpassing us as seen in out fictions. Today, that ideas closer to science-fact rather than fiction. While AI is not (thankfully) sentient like in the movies, tools such as ChatGPT have given something very similar. It can talk to us, create, and edit solutions across different fields of study, enhancing or even completely doing our work.
I was still a university student when ChatGPT first came into prominence, and I witnessed the impact it had. It transformed how students worked almost overnight. Assignments that once took weeks could now be completed in a day with trivial ease, often by feeding lecture notes into the AI and asking it to generate full essays. While this made workflows faster and more efficient, it also came with a cost. These tasks were originally meant to help recall understanding in the subject, but now students could submit polished work without truly learning the material. However, it showed in exams, with many who relied on AI struggled in closed-book tests and couldn’t recall even the basic concepts of their courses.
This raises an uncomfortable question: what happens to the value of higher education if students graduate without genuine mastery of their subjects? I began to notice this among my friends and realized that the problem wasn’t the technology itself, but how it was being used, with many of them treating AI as a part of them, rather than an assistant. I found that the most rational approach to use AI while making sure I am still learning and understanding the subject, was to use AI not to replace my learning, but to supplement, as a tool to fill gaps in my knowledge, and as an intellectual sparring partner in which I could discuss content
The advent of AI should push educational institutions to rethink how they teach. Instead of focusing on assignments that simply test recall, educators could design tasks that demand creative reasoning, problem-solving, and critical thinking areas where collaboration with AI becomes an extension of human intellect rather than a shortcut around it. The arrival of ChatGPT will not mark the end of real and authentic learning, but the beginning of its evolution, one that rewards people’s understanding and ability to utilize knowledge creatively over output.
