A student, frustrated by time constraints and the pressure of deadlines, turned to AI to generate an essay for their English class. Relying on the technology for coherent arguments and polished prose, they submitted the work without fully understanding the content.
Did that look weird to you? It should. Because that entire intro was 100% AI (Artificial Intelligence) generated. With the increase of technology available to students, people have begun to use AI to cheat on assignments in school. When assigned an essay in school, some students will take the easy way out and ask ChatGPT, a popular AI generative tool, to create their essay for them. For example, the intro for this article was created with ChatGPT, and a simple prompt was entered: “Give me 2-3 sentences about a student using AI to cheat on an essay.” Then voila, like magic, the intro was generated.
AI is a tool, not a replacement for writing. It’s not okay to use AI to write an entire article and submitting the created article as your own. First off, AI doesn’t exactly cite your sources, which means you can be plagiarizing without even knowing about it. AI also uses the internet for its knowledge, and it could be giving you false information from non accurate sites, as the internet has a lot of false information on it.
“Struggling with reading and writing means that you are in the process of actually learning, because if everything is always easy, you’re not getting better,” said English teacher Stephanie Cichoski. “The journey is the goal, not the destination.”
Because students and people in general don’t like having to work at things, people resort to AI to do their English essays for them. AI takes away that struggle of reading and writing. Cichoski also stated that 47 of her AP students cheated with AI on a minor summative before the winter break. That’s almost half of her students cheating with AI. I don’t envy the amount of honor code violations she had to write up. Honor code violations are no small thing; if you have enough of them, they can affect your ability to participate in school events and even hinder your ability to get into college.
AI has also been used to generate photos and art. If you’re an art student, and you’re in a time crunch, you might resort to using AI to make art for you. Sounds like it’s amazing, right? Nope. One problem about this, is that AI has a distinctive style of art, and it’s pretty easy to detect using a certain criteria or a detector online. Also, AI can’t make it up out of thin air. AI has been known to take parts of human created art on the internet, and it quite literally steals it, giving no credit. If you’re an artist like me, you know how bad art theft is. To detect AI art on your own, you can look at the style, composition and colors, as AI has patterns that is easy to detect to a trained eye. Another dead giveaway that a piece of art might be AI generated, is that AI generates extra limbs quite often, along with making body proportions very wonky.
As an author and artist myself, I post my art and writing on the internet. Imagine seeing something that looks almost identical to what you had written/drew but it was slightly edited. Looking through the criteria to see what happened, you realized that AI had stolen your writing/art piece. These are times I wish I could hit someone (or something) through the screen on my laptop.
AI can do many things, such as replicating, creating art, generating text, writing code, editing photos, generating photos from a prompt and so much more. Some people worry that AI might take over their jobs as authors and artists. Hopefully we never reach that point. I’ve also noticed seeing an increase in using AI audio for videos, and replacing the need for voice actors. How it works is that you take an already used voice, and AI replicates it. Yet again, AI is being a pain for those in the creative arts. However, AI cannot yet mimic human emotions and the changes in voices whenever it is ‘speaking’.
Even though cheating is bad, AI can also be helpful, if you use it correctly. An example of such is using AI to give you inspiration for a writing piece, or using it to find synonyms for words if you feel that it is too repetitive, or just looking for better transition words to make the piece flow easier. You might also use AI for drawing references, as long as you don’t directly copy it. Useful whenever you have no idea how to draw eyes or hands. Maybe you’ll use AI for a voiceover for a video too, or you’ll use it to get some coding ideas.
Overall, AI is a blessing and a curse. It can be useful to get ideas flowing, but also can easily be abused and used for the wrong purposes. But with the increase in technology, who knows what AI can do in the future? Maybe we will soon find ourselves in a world where humans and AI live together in harmony… or maybe we will be fighting a war against AI.
