Ai Use - Tumblr Posts
im so incredibly against the use of ai in learning and education it's s not even funny. like are there probably good uses for it? is there probably a great way to use it as a tool? yeah of course there's a good and bad way to use everything. but right now, in 2024, the ONLY way people are using ai is the "not great way". they use it as a short cut. as a crutch. as a handicap. they are literally devaluing their education and SHIT man. higher ed, ESPECIALLY in the US, costs too much damn money to be undervaluing it.
last semester, i had to take an english class and i took "writing in health in medicine" bc i am a biology major. now, i have since decided to focus on more environmental research and less on medical research, but regardless it was a class meant to help me understand how to write in academic and scientific ways. one of the first projects of the year was we had to write a literature review. if you aren't in academia or science, this is basically just an essay about 3k words long. in my TEXTBOOK, my university supplied TEXTBOOK for my COLLEGE class, they suggested "if you can't come up with your own research ideas, generate some using chatgtp". and maybe this is a good idea. maybe i'm some kind of freaky paranoid purist of a kind. but in my mind, if you are at a RESEARCH college, in a class designed to teach you how to do research, if you can't come up with a question you want to ask, if you can't even IMAGINE something that you want to learn more about, you shouldn't be in research. ai is emaciating human curiosity, human creativity. you're teaching people not to ask their own questions? not to think for themselves? by saying use chatgtp you're telling them they dont have to THINK OF THINGS. They dont have to be curious and interested and invested. you're ruining them.
it's so fucking frustrating to be in college and know everyone uses chatgpt and to be tempted by it constantly while also knowing intellectually that it doesn't work and it's a bad idea. like, i hang out in the library a lot, and i see people using chatgpt on assignments almost every day. and i know it isn't a good way to learn, because it's not really "artificial intelligence" so much as it is an auto text generator. and it gives you wrong information or badly worded sentences all the time. but every week i stare down assignments i don't want to do and i think man. if only i could type this prompt into a text generator and have it done in 10 minutes flat. and i know it wouldn't work. it wouldn't synthesize information from the text the way professors want, it wouldn't know how to answer questions, it just spits out vaguely related words for a couple paragraphs. but knowing my classmates get their work done in 10 minutes flat with it while i fight every ounce of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in my body is infuriating.