Schools Should Balance AI

Whether it be solving academic assessments, answering daily queries, or writing and generating creative works, artificial intelligence (AI) is able to formulate detailed, reliable answers with minimal human input. Modern-day schools see students and education staff turn to AI for just about everything, the outsourcing machine seeming tireless, taking request after request. AI is praised as a device of endless knowledge, stretching so far as to being an essential tool woven throughout institutions of learning. However, when uncritical towards artificial intelligence, the helpful technology ends up doing more harm than good.

Students are left without enforced limitations for how to appropriately use AI, getting it to construct presentations, essays, and art with the click of a button. Yet it must come into question: how does AI limit its own users? Primary and secondary school students are the ones who've grown up with the internet as we see it today. They've been given devices to chat with friends or watch video media, but primarily for educational content. However, what is rarely acknowledged is the access to cheating that comes with technology, that overshadows every course or article out there.

Even when AI is promoted as an assistant, it takes centre stage as the writer, editor, and creative thinker for many student pieces. Formerly studying day and night, students now turn to artificial intelligence as the go-to for their learning, replacing already-equipped textbooks and denying the need to write down information. AI, however, is not simply inefficient or unreliable, but instead too advanced for most users to catch up, ending up unbalanced and dominating discussion.

Requiring minimal individual input, students are accustomed to overuse AI. From personal experience, schools provide supported, intelligent articles and textbooks, yet never challenge students to be critical of them, nor to see what lies beyond the surface. Consequently, young, impressionable students are easily prone to trusting sources presented as reliable. Artificial intelligence is endorsed online as credible — by social media and by itself — even when done invalidly. AI is fraught with error, outdated sources and answers, and unusual wording that can be picked out easily. These facets of misinformation harm students in both their learning and creative process. Yet students continue to use it.

When pupils think uncritically of AI, what is to say they will not exploit it and actually face consequences? It is seen across internet platforms — students getting busted for using AI disingenuously to make their essays. They are publicly called out, never truly understanding what went wrong.

The brain is a cocktail of both creative and academic thinking, taking learnt ideas and independent discoveries to make a person who can encode, think sharply, and create. Artificial intelligence was created to not only advance but replicate; however, when AI is finding the answers and doing all the crucial processing, how can a person develop their own thinking skills and formulate their thoughts independently? These students who use AI for every assignment voluntarily muffle their intellectual abilities, halt development, and are destined to struggle by adulthood. Schools can't just allow the future generations to decline, yet currently they have only been watching this slow process, never acting to counterbalance it. When students become dependent on AI to solve tasks — treating AI as a necessity — struggling to think on their own, how can schools ensure change is properly made?

On the surface, educators appear to work tirelessly to make slideshow presentations, engaging booklets, and all the things in school that connect students with their teachers and encourage learning. Yet beyond what is shown, educators can be found guilty as major users, themselves, of artificial intelligence. From personal stories online, teachers are well known to generate paragraphs for things like PowerPoints due to an overestimation of AI's efficiency. It is not to say educators should be restricted from using artificial intelligence, yet the misuse is learnt by students.

Then how must artificial intelligence be balanced within learning environments? Students who turn to AI in the first place do so because of impressionability, mainly from word of mouth and first-hand influences. It is unfair to put this balancing in the hands of them and expect positive results. Instead, education staff must be the ones to model and properly enforce a balancing of AI. Going in depth into the harms — yet also the benefits — of using AI is a simple, effective way of ensuring an understanding, for young students, of why artificial intelligence as a tool exists. With that, a collective effort to reintroduce articles, books, and news sources is recommended, so as to harmonise with artificial intelligence simply giving out answers.