With the rising popularity of AI, there’s no doubt that it is slowly being implemented into everyday life. Apps like Google and Apple Maps use AI to provide you with the fastest and safest route to get from place to place. Self-driving cars use AI sensors to identify their surroundings and possible hazards. Language learning models like Snapchat’s My AI and OpenAI’s GPT are only becoming more advanced. It’s safe to say that AI is used in a lot of different places and ways.
AI being implemented into everyday life can be easily tied into talks about academic dishonesty. Students have the ability to use AI to do their school work for them by simply typing a prompt into a program such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini and getting results back within seconds.
“It takes away from people’s ability to think which I just think is really important,” Gary Baumstark, Language Arts teacher, said. “I think people become over reliant on it, they become lazy. They don’t use their brains or their thought power or their creativity. And I think that’s really important to us as humans.”
It is important to understand how AI language learning models like GPT work. They are fed a lot of data from public sources like books or articles and then take that information and apply it to a learning process known as iterative learning.
According to an article published by Chicago Public Schools, Iterative learning is a process in which a task is done repeatedly, the results get assessed, and the process improves until a certain level of performance is achieved. An AI language learning model uses this to repeatedly look over the data it’s given and apply it to the program after the data is looked over. That’s how an AI chatbot like ChatGPT seems to know everything because of the information it’s given through its learning process.
“AI can be extremely beneficial in so many ways if you know how to prompt it right,” Lauren Schoellhorn, Social Studies teacher, said. “Students, or anyone else can use it to make their lives easier.”
Although it may not seem like it, there are ways teachers have used AI in their teaching curriculum to make it more understandable for both them and their students.
This use of AI to improve their curriculum creates a better learning environment for students as they can quickly adjust the curriculum as needed for the students.
“As a professor, I can use AI to create a scoring guide for me by plugging in the grading criteria I need and asking it to write a rubric appropriate for college students,” Schoellhorn said.
Michael McDonald, Math teacher, has described how using AI in his teaching has allowed him to get work in his curriculum done faster.
“I’ll use Photomath to quickly just check an answer key so that way you know it’s quicker than me having to go to another teacher to ask for them to check it,” McDonald said. “I think if you use it as a tool, it can be a great resource if you are able to get part of the way through a problem, but if you can use Photomath to see what the next step should be, then I think you’re using it the right way.”
Teachers have found positive ways to implement the use of AI into their work, however they still recognize the cons of AI as detrimental to a students ability to learn and process information.
“Having the AI ‘power’ can definitely be tempting to use it in negative ways,” Schoellhorn said. “It does make it easier for students, or adults for that matter, I’ve seen in graduate level students, to cheat or pass off ideas that aren’t theirs. It also, if used for everything, makes it so that people don’t have to think which can kill creativity and learning.”
