By Jason Foster
Artificial Intelligence has been something of a hot topic, in recent years - one look around the internet will tell you exactly why. In fact, my habit of using em-dashes in my own writing may be flagged as AI, and at times, my typos are my saving grace when it comes to proving my work is, in fact, imperfect, and therefore human made. But, as writers, avoiding Artificial Intelligence just makes sense. Where's the need for plagiarism, if you have the experience under your fingertips? Well, for some people, especially university students whose idea of a quiet afternoon does not include typing up a thousand-word essay or newspaper article, AI has been a saving grace. ChatGPT, Deepseek, Perplexity… all these AI chat-bots save you time, compiling full length essays in the span of a few seconds.
By now, you're likely expecting this article to turn into a tirade about the evils of Artificial Intelligence. The wasteful water usage, the loss of creativity that comes with continued use, the soulless, machine-made compilations of objectively good (stolen) writing, used to create essays that are repetitive in prose, perfect in syntax, and lifeless in expression. However I would suspect these things are common knowledge, by this time. And, at least for now, AI is here to stay. It would be unrealistic to look around and say otherwise.
University can be a competitive academic environment - grade point averages, after all, are numerical measurements of success over the course of a degree. AI is levelling the playing field, so to speak, in two very distinct ways: short term, and long term. As demoralizing as it is, though AI has clear flaws, some students may be discouraged watching their peers use ChatGPT and get high marks, barely bothering to put pencil to paper in order to study. This, however, is the short term. University, as we sometimes forget in our earlier years, is focused on the long term.
In that case, if you currently use artificial intelligence for your assignments, studying, coursework, exams... keep at it. Yes; please, by all means, feel free to continue.
Writing, reading comprehension, patience, handwriting practice and researching are skills, meant to be developed over the course of your golden years at university. If you simply never develop these, well... it leaves more jobs open for those who did. Artificial intelligence is seeming to prove the theory of natural selection, yet again. Survival of the fittest is one of nature's cruellest laws, since a person cannot help if they happen to be one of the 'fittest', or left behind. Chronic disease, old age, genetics or birth defects are not fair, and we do not make the choice to have them. Artificial intelligence usage, however, is a choice. It is one anybody can make, and one students of all ages have been making, as of late, in order to skip the hard work usually involved in schoolwork.
It is no logical leap to say students who do this, over and over again, will miss out on the benefits of doing the work themselves. Learning how to comprehend a historical text through the lens of the sociocultural norms of the era cannot be learned by asking an algorithm to read and compile the text into important bullet points. Learning how to structure, research and write a comprehensive essay with proper transitions and paragraph lengths cannot be developed, if a person doesn't delve into the specifics of the topic beyond typing 'write me an essay on segregation' into ChatGPT.
In fact, in a recent study by MIT, participants were split into three groups, and asked to write essays. One used ChatGPT, one used typical search engines, and one group used their raw knowledge. The ChatGPT group found it much more difficult to remember quotes from their own essays, compared to the brain only or search engine groups. As well, the participants’ brain activity showed much less divergent thinking compared to the other two groups, and their essays objectively scored much lower in terms of quality as well. Granted, this study had a rather small sample size, but the methodology is legitimate, suggesting that the hypothesis of ChatGPT usage lowering creativity, intellectual participation and knowledge growth is a true one.
If you are to consciously make the choice to use AI chat-bots to structure and formulate your coursework, who am I to stop you? Please, go right ahead. Enter adulthood, and the competitive, unstable job market with no formally developed skills in reading comprehension, persuasive writing, or perhaps even without important knowledge in the field you 'studied' in. You are leaving jobs open for the people who put in the hard work and developed those much-needed skills in their respective fields. Your professors can surely tell you this - a PhD, or doctorate, takes years and years of hard work and dedication. All professors have to be intricately familiar with relevant material in order to not only teach comprehensively, but put their own interests in with the course material, such as Dr. Foster's interest in supernova remnants, or Dr. Winters' interest in the history of the technology of writing.
In the end, you are only harming yourself and your own comprehensive abilities. Feel free to continue, but be warned; look around, consider your future. Consider the future of your peers, the long term of your own. And, if after reading this article you are motivated to prove your own abilities are strong without Artificial Intelligence, do it. Secure your own future - nobody else can do that for you, especially not ChatGPT.