Blog: AI Has Killed Education (and Here’s How to Fix It).

It’s now late July which means that it’s time to start thinking about school again. For many of us, that means buying new backpacks, stationary, books, clothes, and laptops, but there’s something that I don’t think a lot of people are thinking about as they enter the school year and that’s AI.

This topic comes up after a I was chatting with my dad about AI. It brought to mind a conversation I had with a guy I used to go to church with who I’ll call Caleb. During this conversation, we were having a friendly debate about the merits of AI in the classroom, particularly in writing. Me, being someone who has always shown an aptitude for writing and feels the traditional ways of learning via books and physical notetaking, was arguing against AI being in the classroom. Meanwhile, Caleb was of the opinion that AI should be allowed and even admitted that because writing was not his strong suit and he was lazy (his words, not mine), the majority of his papers for junior year were written by Chat GPT. I argued that that was cheating, but his response was that he was just exploiting a loophole in the system, that “the teachers never said I couldn’t use AI.” He was so confident that AI would solve all of his writing woes that he wouldn’t even have to write his daily logs if he got into the military (which was what he wanted to do after school). In a later conversation back in April around a similar subject, he told me that he was also using AI to solve problems in calculus purely because he didn’t want to work an answer down to the 27th decimal point (which I can’t blame him, but still).

After I recounted this memory to my dad, he told me two things. First, if he were an employer, he would never hire Caleb because his constant use of AI showed laziness and would likely negatively inpact his independent problem-solving skills in the future. Second, he told me that more broadly if he were any employer, he would be hesitant to hire anyone who graduated college or high school post 2020, because they most likely relied on AI to pass their classes.

Unfortunately, my dad isn’t the only person who feels this way as more and more headlines come out about students using AI programs to pass their classes. A video recently went viral of a student graduating from UCLA proudly showing off ChatGPT on his laptop, bragging that he had used it to write his final paper.

This naturally sparked backlash online as people questioned this student’s intelligence and integrity. How much of his college career had been spent actually learning versus using AI to do everything for him? And on a larger scale, how many students had done the same thing, but were smart enough to keep their mouths shut about it?

Other questions are being raised as well. How will this affect fields which necessitate a college degree and experience, such as engineering, medicine, science, etc.? How will this affect learning overall? Is this actually helping students or harming them? It also doesn’t help that a recent study from MIT shows that people who use AI constantly become dumber, with the report saying participants allowed to use AI “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” This also isn’t mentioning the posts from teachers observing their students as young as elementary school using AI to answer questions on worksheets and tests.

Because of this, in a society where most people already don’t think, AI is increasing the problem as people outsource their thinking to it. This is dangerous as not only will people not be able to think for themselves, but they may be getting results that are incorrect as AI continues to have random hallucinations. So how do we fix this problem?

I think the first option to fix this is for parents to start parenting again. A lot of why teachers have a hard time teaching today is because when their students’ parents allowed them to be raised by the internet, they’re no longer dealing with students not wanting to learn. They’re dealing with addicts, a problem that’s harder to solve the younger they’re hooked. Thus, parents need to stop giving their kids phones and tablets with internet almost the moment they’re out of the womb.

The second thing that needs to be done is technology needs to be kept out of the classroom as much as possible. Phones? None of those unless they 1). have no internet or 2). are needed for a legit medical issue (such as diabetes). Computers? Okay, but they should have controls on them to block AI platforms that can only be accessed by teachers or parents. Same with tablets. If they have a problem with that, too bad. Be grateful you’re not having to learn how to use a typewriter. This way, though kids will still run into AI at some point, during their school years, hopefully this should help with AI destroying education.

The second way is for AI to become the teacher. Give the kid a computer that is completely run by the AI and have them learn there. They won’t be allowed to use any other devices while working on their set amount of schoolwork, and thus, won’t be allowed to use any other AI to cheat. It would also allow it to be something they could use on the go. No more missing school for other things, no more homework. It would almost be like homeschooling. And while this certainly isn’t my favorite route, I have a feeling that this is where society is headed in the next few years.

Until next time,

M.J.