learntoquestion ltq discussions

Given the current education system, especially in middle and high schools, the increase in AI use as it rapidly becomes available is the natural next step in the deterioration of academic integrity. Students are taught that their value and purpose are largely defined by academic performance, and at a time of life that is perpetually stressful and full of countless challenges, it often becomes the case that they will do whatever it takes to prioritize outward academic success even if it doesn’t reflect what they’ve actually learned. If allowed to continue, this will only continue to make education ineffective and encourage young people to sacrifice their ability to think critically before they are able to realize what they’re losing. But this doesn’t have to be the case, with proper adjustments made to how we learn to combat the over-reliance on AI. Schools should prioritize interpersonal communication and complex thought, skills that will hopefully never be obsolete and can encourage real connections and humanity beyond what AI can apathetically replicate. In the article on using AI to cheat in school, and the potential pros, the author argues that “if the current AI can cheat effectively for you, the current AI can also write better than you. In other words, our universities are not teaching our citizens sufficiently valuable skills; rather we are teaching them that which can be cloned at low cost.” Although probably true, this is an overtly dystopian view on the rise of AI. It claims that writing made by humans is no longer valuable, simply because a non-human entity can do it “better.” This technically has some truth to it, but in a much more true sense, the value in any sort of writing, fiction, non-fiction, even student writing, is that it is a product of the still unexplained human mind. Anyone has the power to create anything, and it’s special because it’s something that has never been made before. AI, on the other hand, just regurgitates everything ever written by humans in different shapes, and passes it off as original. Maybe it can write with better “quality,” but it completely lacks what makes human writing important. Additionally, there is the question of availability of resources in different places, and how AI will deepen current advantages and disparities from a very young age. For this reason, even leaving out the obvious danger to humanity that AI in schools poses, AI should be limited exclusively to professionals, specifically in medicine, and should not be available to the general public.

BLS, BPS, and the American school system as a whole foster an environment that drives kids to cheat themselves and use AI out of desperation. Students have the pressure of making good grades constantly hanging above them, especially at Boston Latin where everything is so cutthroat and competitive. Students are convinced that they need to go to an elite college to be successful in life, and believe they need perfect grades to be accepted. Thus, it can feel like their entire life is on the line when they believe they are incapable of earning an A on their own. Coupled with outside pressure from overbearing parents, students are driven to use AI out of desperation. They sacrifice their own opportunity to genuinely learn because they feel it is necessary. This problem is worsened by the fact that BPS does a poor job of preparing many of its students for the rigor of its exam schools.

This problem is not unique to Boston, however. It is clearly tied to general societal shifts in education, such as the No Child Left Behind initiative and the abandonment of humanities education in favor of stem. Standardized tests have led su to value performance over progress. Getting a good mark is more important than actually learning material. This is also reflected in stem-centered education, emphasizing computational skills rather than critical thinking or analysis. This furthers the climate where students are driven to use AI because knowing the answer is more important than understanding the answer—the thinking is absent. This devaluation of critical thinking skills leads to increased reliance on AI.

Schools also drive students to use AI out of pure disinterest. An education system that values statistics like achievement and college acceptance rate over student interests and active engagement fosters a “learning” environment where students are given no reason to care about learning at all. Thus, they are led to AI out of laziness arising from boredom. If schools valued their students’ needs above their own prestige, performance, and ranking, we would not see so much AI usage.

Schools need to take AI punishments more seriously. If there was a real threat of expulsion for using AI, students would be motivated to do their own real work, even if it meant not getting that A+. Though extreme, they would recognize that expulsion poses a bigger threat to their college acceptance than a B-. Similarly, teachers should be fired for using AI. They are paid to think and paid to teach kids to think. If they let AI think for them and encourage their students to do the same, they are shirking the basic responsibilities of their job and taking money for work they are not doing. If students wanted AI to give feedback on their papers, they would just ask it themselves. There is no need for a person in between.

Ultimately, the rise of AI in schools needs to be more taken seriously as it reveals deep flaws in our education system.

Humans can feel and can experience, robots cannot. Humans have felt the unimaginable joy of belly laughing with family, the power of grief when losing a loved one, or even the pride of earning something after working incredibly hard for it. I believe that there is no real way to program this into a robot and no way to describe these feelings unless one has actually felt and experienced them. The most special thing about being human is the way that we get to feel everything so deeply, even if we don’t realize it. These shared experiences of feeling that almost everyone has experienced at least once in their life allow us to connect with each other and form relations. AI will never truly be able to replicate or teach these things because of how personal and unique, yet also common experiences they are. Humanity's ultimate role is being the creator not only of other humans but in our society. As humans, we create the atmosphere, we create the environment, and we create our society. There are so many factors that go into creating this space, especially those that differentiate us as humans. For example, how we were raised, the outlooks and perspectives we have on life and our society, and even each of our own opinions. AI cannot mimic nor try and recreate this space or the things that make it. These are the kinds of things that can’t be described and are most just a relatable human experience that most everyone can understand with a brain. AI also cannot replace human interaction. Human interactions involve social clues, behavioral clues, and context clues that are learned through having conversations with people. As humans, we are able to figure out how to respond in conversation based on these clues. As I am writing this, I am struggling to even define what it is that allows humans to have and create conversations because of how basic yet also unique it is to us. That makes me wonder how it would even be possible to code every single kind of conversation into AI. Experiencing life, no matter where you come from, you will meet a lot of different kinds of people and may have to have different kinds of conversations with each of them. Like, there is a way to talk to someone who is younger than you and a way to talk to someone older than you with more authority. There is a way to talk to someone who is struggling with something, and depending on what they are struggling with, there is a certain way for each case to be talked to. AI is kind of like an animal. Most animals can’t feel and don’t function like humans. Which is ok, and they still live safe, productive lives. We have not tried to enforce our ways of living onto animals and force them to feel and experience as we do as humans. AI should be treated no differently. Factors such as conversation, connection, and experience are so uniquely human. The basic aspects of each are able to be explained in order to better understand, but the deeper meanings of each that make us all more human and relatable humans at that, are much harder to explain, but the fact that they are only understood if already understood because of one's prior experiences.

I think that AI shouldn’t be used in the classroom because the point of school is to develop the ability to think and express your thoughts, not get assignments done quickly. There is virtually no assignment given in highschool that has or is designed to have a directly practical application in the real world. The argument that AI should be allowed because it is used in the real world shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of school. For the most part, we dont learn technical skills in school, we are developing our reasoning skills. High schools like BLS aren’t vocational. If the students were trying to prepare themselves to go straight into a job they would go to a vocational high school. The only real technical skill learned in school is the ability to write, read, and think critically. AI takes this away because it can write and summarize writing for us. This allows a student to not think while doing assignments.

The concern that it is extremely hard to regulate AI use or cheating in the classroom is valid. The onus of this is on the teacher. If you are giving assignments that can easily be cheated with AI, those are bad assignments because they don’t promote thought. AI is not good at creating its own ideas. It should be pretty obvious that something is AI because it won’t make much sense taken in a wider, more free-form context.

On the teacher's side, AI is being used for a number of reasons. It can create lesson plans, grade papers, and structure assignments. The author of “Everyone’s Using AI to Cheat at School. That’s a Good Thing.”, Tyler Cowen, writes about how he uses AI to give his students comments on their papers. “Maybe they are not all on-target—how would I know?!—but the student, who has studied the topic extensively, can judge that for himself. In any case the feedback was almost certainly much better than anything I might come up with.” I don’t think he realizes what he’s saying. Yes AI may know more than he would about the subject but his job is to give feedback. As a PhD advisor, he is being paid solely to give his students feedback on their papers. If he doesn’t read them, what’s the point of keeping him employed? On top of that, he is saying that he doesn’t even know what the bot is saying. He doesn’t know if the feedback is good or not, he’s just too lazy to worry about it. This displays the issue with the education system and how this author personally is a bad teacher, while also showing why his argument is weak.

The biggest takeaway is that we need to make the education system more human and less robotic so that students learn to be human, not to rely on a computer. AI is useful now because our education system isn’t good in certain important ways. The best solution is to change the system so that AI cannot do the work well. We want students to learn to think and be better humans, not pieces of a machine. Individuals who aren’t reliant on a computer.

There is no doubt that the use of AI is rapidly increasing everyday, particularly in educational settings, but it is certainly important to consider how current structural issues within our education system contribute to many students’ reliance on AI as an academic tool. One obvious issue is the enormous workload that students must tackle every single day. When a student has extracurriculars, familial responsibilities, long commutes to school, jobs, and hobbies, it is extremely difficult and overwhelming to allocate time for everything. There’s simply not enough hours in the day, and this leaves no time for personal time or rest. One of the most attractive things about AI is its convenience and how quick and easy it is to get a response. So while I don’t think using AI to do all of your work is okay, it certainly is easy to understand why students may turn to AI. On that note, I do think that AI truly can be used responsibly as an academic tool. Students could use it to get more background information or detailed explanations about a topic, to brainstorm ideas, or even as an aid for studying. It becomes wrong, though, when the student completely relies on AI to complete their assignments for them. For this reason, I think that it would be beneficial and valuable to prioritize in-person skills like discussion and communication skills. This would push students to think critically about subjects without automatic input or answers from AI. It’s important that we retain the ability to think outside the box, form our own opinions, and know how to communicate with others. It’s also clear that the huge emphasis on grades in our educational system has largely contributed to students’ reliance on AI. School has shifted to placing importance on the grades that students receive, rather than the material students are learning. The thought of potentially getting a low grade certainly motivates students to turn to AI because they know that it is better and smarter in objective assignments. This intense pressure to get perfect grades causes students to lose sight of the value of the work that they do. Grades have unfortunately become a measure of one’s “success” in school, so it’s easy for students to turn to something that is so easily “capable of doing extraordinary things” (Tyler Cowen, Everyone's Using AI To Cheat at School) to guarantee that success. As AI becomes more and more accessible and prevalent, it’s imperative that we understand how it is impacting students and what issues it may be presenting, but it is perhaps even more important to consider the structural issues in our education system that are at play.

I think everyone can agree the race for grades in highschool is very stressful. In order to get ahead, people have, and will, resort to dishonesty and the use of unsanctioned materials. Thirty years ago the internet arrived on the scene and revolutionized education. Now that computers are integrated into classrooms AI becomes a new challenge. AI works by reading all texts on the internet and guessing what answer the person is asking for based off of the prompt. This process is plagiarism, yet people argue that it is not that different from a search engine. The College Board allows the use of AI for two AP courses: AP Research and AP Seminar. These courses are meant to enhance a passion learned in another AP course. If someone had to research (using AI) what topics might be interesting, then they both did not really show the level of interest or critical thinking which is the general purpose of this test. However, because the test is a submitted portfolio there is no way to prevent the use of AI.

The most difficult discussion of AI is how to maintain equity if it is going to be used regardless of moral or educational concern, as well as an inability to prevent it. BLS is hated because of its large endowment and greater resources than other schools. However, private schools have much larger endowments and much smaller student bodies. In order to not lag behind, it would make sense for the public schools to prevent all forms of AI as much as possible. Enhancing critical reading, the ability to write, figuring out difficult math proofs, and philosophical or political thinking are the most important things learned at school. Giving an in on all of these tasks to AI will limit students’ education. The most important jobs of a teacher are the emotional and physical safety of students, inspiring further learning in their material, and the actual mental development of children. Reading is the most important thing that people can do. Reading summaries is not the same. Humans have gone so far, and are continuing to do so. In advanced research, AI may have uses in churning through datasets and doing complex computations but in highschool we have not gotten far enough for that to be needed.

I think Ai has really brought out the flaws of the education system as well as their inability to evolve. While cars, planes, technology, and sports have continued to change, an american classroom and curriculum has remained the same for the last 100 years. Now, with the introduction of ai, teachers and school are held accountable for their flaws, being giving busy work, and not teaching on the basis of cold hard facts. Ai has made it laughably easy for students to cheat, plageralize, and complete assignments super quickly with zero though put into them. To some extent, I do blame the students. It is definitely academic dishonesty and a form of cheating, but I place more of the blame on the educators: they need to evolve. At BLS, the community is highly competitive, and therefore many kids feel as though they need to cheat, not because of a knowledge issue, but rather to keep up with their classmates and get into the same colleges.

This brings me to my next point: the colleges. Colleges need to find a quantitative approach that is more air tight than just someones high school transcript. This is because there is a ton of grade inflation, and rampant cheating and Ai use in high schools across the country. This incentivises kids to cheat, and now everyone has a 4.0 GPA. There are the test scores, but those can be more difficult for some students and are not really a true measurement of intelligence.

Finally, I think teachers should be held accountable if they use Ai in the same way that students. In high school, there should be some serious disciplinary action against the teachers if they use Ai to do their jobs and aren’t transparent when doing so. So in universities, students can get expelled for using Ai when not permitted to, and so professors should be fired. I think this policy will either cause the teachers to eliminate AI from classrooms, or integrate it into their lessons and assignments. This would be a big change which wouldn’t be in the favor of the teachers, but it has to be done now or else when Ai becomes more and more advanced, the clandestine use of it in classrooms will skyrocket.

Accessibility to AI has opened up many opportunities for innovation and education across diverse fields, however, it cannot replicate the depth of human empathy and ethical judgement that comes from experience. Qualities like empathy, vulnerability, and the ability for self-reflection can’t be imitated by AI as they are tied to lived experiences and personal growth. AI can mimic human behavior and thoughts, but it can’t feel human emotions. This may seem beneficial to people who are more introverted and aren’t excited by the thought of interacting with other humans, and they may think that interacting with chatbots alone can satisfy their emotional needs, but this is a dangerous illusion. Relying on AI for emotional comfort risks creating a society where people feel okay never confronting their problems or discomfort because there’s constant validation from AI programs. If AI replaces emotionally and intellectually complex roles like friends or teachers, then this would lead to a decline in critical thinking skills and the willingness to engage meaningfully with others. In the article “Your Chatbot Won’t Cry If You Die,” it was stated that, “But researchers believe that part of loneliness comes from the fact that an increasing number of people don’t feel needed.” If more people continue to rely on AI for emotional support, rather than humans, then it can contribute to a vicious cycle of loneliness where no one feels wanted or needed. Human connections are built on mutual effort and growth, none of which AI requires. Furthermore, as AI technologies become more integrated into wealthier societies, a more stark divide begins to emerge between those who have access and those who do not. Rather than bridging the gap, AI can widen it. AI is a powerful tool that should be used for assistance and efficiency, but it shouldn’t be a replacement for what makes us human. A society where people prefer talking to machines over humans is dystopian and ultimately dehumanizing. Humans need to be challenged and should reflect on their flaws, and resorting to AI for everything creates a bubble where egos are constantly affirmed and humanity is neglected.

I think that ethical is not necessarily the right word to use when describing warfare as war itself brings death, destruction and desperation, additionally I am anti war in general. The idea of any war being truly “ethical” seems contradictory. However, I do understand that there are ways to ensure that when necessary fighting exists between those who chose to fight. Militaries have always sought technological advantages which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. In fact I think that it is just a natural thing about fighting, we went into WW1 on horses and came out in tanks, that’s simply the nature of technological progression. The question is whether or not that saved lifes? I don't know if anyone can say for sure but it definitely ended the war faster than a bunch of men with muskets and bayonets could have.

I do think that it is ethical to use technology to save the lives of soldiers. There is a difference however between using AI and using drones/machinery that don't have humans in them but are operated by humans. I do not think that it is moral to send a bunch of 18 year old boys to their death just to make a war seem unappealing. I do not think that AI should be able to make decisions or carry out any actions on their own. As the article explained, AI makes decisions based on patterns that it recognizes, and it is possible that it picks up on patterns that are not actually there or are not relevant. However as I was reading the article I couldn't help but think that every criticism that people have on AI weapons humans contain those flaws. Humans have deeply rooted biases and act on fear, and very frequently make mistakes. So even if AI makes mistakes it could be significantly less than the soldiers themselves. This is why I think it would be beneficial all around to combine the two parts and have them not work independently of each other.

I don't see how using AI to create propaganda differs from humans doing it themselves. Similar to many AI functions, the issue lies more with the product than the system.

I do not think that a global ban would be helpful at all, as shown throughout history prohibiting things doesn't make them disappear but rather allows them to be used by irresponsible people. Regulations including a requirement that there is always human oversight and involvement seems to me like the best path to take.