Perhaps one of the biggest changes I have encountered during my time in college has been the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and its insertion into our everyday life. AI has been around as a concept for much longer than the past four years, but it has not entered the mainstream until the last two years. In this sense, AI is a modern marvel; the fact that we can train a computer to (supposedly) think like a human being is the stuff of science fiction. However, I am not entirely sure if the integration of AI into our everyday lives has been for the better.
The arena in which I encounter AI the most is everyday schoolwork. Occasionally, I will look over at one of my classmates’ screens during class, and they are typing away in ChatGPT to get their answer. A large part of me feels discouraged, for a few different reasons.
First, I am discouraged because I know that my method of problem-solving will never match up to a computer. In second grade, my math teacher had us do an activity where we did simple multiplication problems while our partner solved the same problem on a calculator. Inevitably, I (the student) was able to solve 7 x 9 faster than a manual calculator. The point of this exercise was to show us that it is not prudent to jump to use a calculator at any given opportunity, because it is often less efficient than using our brains. Although I am no longer doing second-grade-level multiplication in my classes, it is no longer true that my brain power can outperform the computer. I might end up at the same result as ChatGPT, but it will have taken me a significantly longer time, since ChatGPT has an essentially unlimited repository of information from which it can pull information. In times like these, I can see the appeal of ChatGPT: It is simply a much more efficient tool by which we can complete our problem sets and assignments. However, I cannot help but feel that we are, in the end, disadvantaging ourselves by letting a computer do our hard work. We no longer get to go through the process of problem solving ourselves, and are therefore unable to really engage with our fields of study. Furthermore, while we are able to access ChatGPT while doing problem sets, I would be surprised if people were able to do so while taking exams. We are just creating more work for ourselves by taking a shortcut earlier in the process, instead of trying to engage with content.
The second reason that I feel discouraged is because we are, in some ways, contributing to our own future unemployment. As a senior who is currently looking for a job, I have already been told once that a position that was available in previous years has been phased out because they have decided to use AI instead. When I received that news, I had to sit down for a couple of minutes and really think about how we, as a society, have reached this point already. This is the problem with all automation at the end of the day: It takes jobs away from people, and in many cases creates greater inequalities and divisions between different levels of labor and work. For example, the job that I had inquired about is often considered a “stepping stone” for students before they enter medical school, in which they are able to get clinical experience and experience interacting with patients in a formal medical setting. If positions like this one start to get phased out because AI is being used, how are students going to get the kind of experience that helps them become better doctors later on? The divisions become greater the more that we integrate artificial intelligence, and we inevitably move more toward an employment system that prioritizes profit and efficiency over workers and their growth and development. I will concede that scientific and technical fields are a little bit more vulnerable to AI than perhaps other fields are, but no field is immune at the end of the day. While ChatGPT can usually solve a mathematical problem, it is harder for it to write a high-quality, college level essay. However, the more that we use artificial intelligence, the “smarter” it gets, as we are giving it new information upon which it can train itself. The “smarter” it gets, the more capable it could be of making our future jobs obsolete.
This is not to suggest that I think AI should be completely avoided. I think there are some positive uses for AI. One of the things that I have used it for in the past is generating practice problems for a standardized test, and I found this to be helpful. Still, I could not help but think that I might be contributing to something a little bit more devious than we understand right now. After all, it is AI itself that is responsible for some terrible things, including nude photos of unconsenting individuals and misinformation that is already rampant across the internet. Especially when we are about to enter an election cycle which may have significant consequences for Americans, the last thing we need is another way of spreading fake news and false information across the internet. It is times like this when we must ask ourselves if two extra points on a problem set is really worth contributing to something that has continued to create mayhem across the world.