How a Lazy College Student Views AI

Is it really all it’s cracked up to be?

To be honest, I didn’t put a lot of stock into AI before taking my writing seminar class this past semester. I thought it was just something that people used to write papers using ChatGPT. Since I am an English and Communications double-major, I obviously was never for that because it felt disingenuous to me. It was not an appealing idea considering I needed to be able to hold my academic integrity and write papers on very specific topics. But after learning more about what AI actually is, plus the real world implications it has on my life, I feel more confident in talking about it at least from the perspective of a, once again, lazy college student.

I have come to the understanding that AI is truly everywhere. It’s in the editing app that I use for my papers, it is in the social media apps that I use and the algorithms it creates to bring me the content I enjoy. It’s even in my Google search bar that I used every single day looking for answers on the internet.

And while AI can do a lot of amazing things, and most of its uses seem to be inconspicuous and just generally helpful, we can’t overlook the big impacts that AI has on jobs, how it can steal content, as well as undermine learning.

AI Affects Jobs

Innovation is everywhere and occurs constantly throughout generations and millennia. However with new technologies there are always going to be Job displacements. However with the use of AI, it is as my classmate Mika said, “By replacing us as humans we are eliminating jobs that we are not prepared to replace.” From Business Insider, “…75% of the projected declines in job levels are in four categories: office support, customer service and sales, food services, and production work (e.g., manufacturing)” (Zinkula, 2024). Not to mention that over 300 million jobs around the world could be impacted by AI (Skandul, 2023). This is a significant amount of jobs that AI is going to take over and we need to be prepared to replace the jobs that AI is going to take over. We need to be able to make sure people have a steady income and we are not putting people into poverty with these new innovations. Eliminating jobs is the bad end goal that AI seems to be heading towards.

AI Steals Content

If you’re a college student like me, some of the first words that come to mind when someone brings up AI is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an open AI chat that many students take advantage of to help with school. According to Forbes, 89% admit to using it to help with homework, while “48% of students admitted to using ChatGPT for an at-home test or quiz, 53% had it write an essay, and 22% had it write an outline for a paper.” (Westfall, 2023). This is half of students! That is nothing to sneeze at.

But there are some many other applications like it that people can use that we just don’t know about. And I am guilty of using some of them, such as Otter.ai, to make my life easier as an undergraduate researcher. But for others, AI’s such as SudoWrite exist. SudoWrite is an AI program that, in its worst form, can essentially write an entire novel with just vibes being inputted into it. This is bad for a few reasons, but the baseline is that applications such as SudoWrite use other works from others who did not give their consent. We know this because of SudoWrite knowing about the “Omegaverse” which is a common trope amongst fanfiction writers (Eveleth, 2023). The problem with SudoWrite knowing about this trope, is the fact that it is creating a profit with the database of fanfiction writers when they themselves cannot make a profit off it because of copyright. This is an ethical dilemma that we as a society need to discuss when it comes to AI and how it can, and should be used.

AI Undermines Learning

With AI’s like ChatGPT and SudoWrite existing, our ability as humans to be able to think critically is at stake. Yes, they really can’t do much without a person inputting prompts into it, the fact such technology can create writing that requires no real thought behind it is concerning. According to Pew Research Center, if a teenager has heard of ChatGPT in the U.S., 1 in 5 of them have used it for schoolwork (Sidoti & Gottfried, 2023). This number can only grow the more that AI becomes more socially acceptable. As a college student, I have not had this be an issue for my peers to a detrimental degree, but you must remember that we also didn’t have it. If I had this back in middle or high school, I am scared to find out how much my classmates and I would have used this to write seemingly pointless papers. Even so, I know of too many classmates who have used ChatGPT for school or have thought it a good idea now that it exists. It makes me worry for the integrity of future scholars. Why would I write my own analysis of data when I can have something else do it for me?

This takes away from student’s critical thinking skills. If students are able to use AI for their schoolwork, it completely undermines their ability to think for themselves and come up with their own ideas.

Takeaways

These reasons are why we need to seriously talk about how and when AI should be used in everyday life. Where should AI source its data from? How much should we be able to use it to create for us? How are we going to keep up with the technology? We cannot simply leave these discussions to the creators of the AI. We need to have these discussions and determine how willing we are to replace our humanity with something that is trying to copy us.

Some companies are already trying to address these issues. One AI that was created is called Claude made by Anthropic and is what they call a “Collective Constitutional AI.” This is essentially an AI that is created and has limitations based on the values that people believe AI should follow (Anthropic, 2023). Creating an AI using the feedback from real people is a wonderful step in the right direction. But this one AI that is being created in the image and with the values of the people at heart, does not take away from the fact that there are so many others that are not doing that. We need to take back the control over the AI conversation and really think about the implications that AI can have not only on our lives, but those around us.

It is only when we do that we can truly call AI a helpful, and ethical, tool.

References

Anthropic. Collective Constitutional AI: Aligning a Language Model with Public Input. (2023, October 17). https://www.anthropic.com/news/collective-constitutional-ai-aligning-a-language-model-with-public-input

Eveleth, R. (2023, May 15). The Fanfic Sex Trope That Caught a Plundering AI Red-Handed. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/fanfiction-omegaverse-sex-trope-artificial-intelligence-knotting/

Sidoti, O. & Gottfried, J. (2023, November 16). About 1 in 5 U.S. teens who’ve heard of ChatGPT have used it for schoolwork. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/16/about-1-in-5-us-teens-whove-heard-of-chatgpt-have-used-it-for-schoolwork/

Skandul, E. (2023, August 14). AI is going to eliminate way more jobs than anyone realizes. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-radically-reshape-job-market-global-economy-employee-labor-innovation-2023-8

Westfall, C. (2023, January 28). Educators Battle Plagiarism As 89% Of Students Admit To Using OpenAI’s ChatGPT For Homework. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2023/01/28/educators-battle-plagiarism-as-89-of-students-admit-to-using-open-ais-chatgpt-for-homework/?sh=4cfd14ae750d

Zinkula, J. (2024, January 10). 4 careers where workers will have to change jobs by 2030 due to AI and shifts in how we shop, a McKinsey study says. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/jobs-at-risk-from-ai-replace-change-chatgpt-automation-study-2023-7