AI Negates What Education is Meant to Do: Teach Us How to Think and Ask the Right Questions

Daily writing prompt

How has technology changed your job?

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I retired from my dream job as a college professor because the college’s policy on AI destroyed the reason for learning beyond high school. I once told a student who complained about the level of work in my course that the product that I was selling was how to think critically about the world. To think critically means learning how to ask the right questions and find the answers to solve our world’s problems.

I told him that the work assigned is meant to challenge students to learn how to find information, question what they read, and then, as succinctly as possible, answer the questions asked. I wanted students to understand that the journey to finding the answers is more important than the answers themselves. I didn’t always agree with their answers. But if their arguments were solid, meaning I could see where they had used the library in ways that demonstrated information literacy and made good arguments for their views, they earned As. The goal was not to have them write what I wanted to read but to learn to think through all the possibilities and look at both sides of the issues.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t all bad, but my sixth sense on plagiarism stopped working. Students using ChatGPT and other tools to have papers written for them negated the goals I had for my students. I didn’t fully understand the technology behind AI, and yes, I know that students will need to learn AI for future jobs. My pastor recently attended a class on how to use AI in sermon preparation, which horrified me. I’ve seen photos that seem real but are AI-generated, and I couldn’t tell the difference. What happens when we can’t distinguish truth and reality from falsity?

So, while the technology is probably good, I won’t use it for my blogs because I want readers to know that these are my thoughts, feelings, opinions, and griefs, not some system gathering everyone’s thoughts and presenting them as my truths. Maybe I am a dinosaur because AI scares me, as I wonder if we will forget how to think and what questions to ask to challenge the misinformation and disinformation in the world when machines do the thinking for us! Shouldn’t intelligence be real?