The choice is yours.
All technology presents a choice. For example, the internet. Many people use it to dramatically enrich their lives: building businesses, creating new revenue streams, and forging new connections that span continents. At the same time, many others use it to diminish their potential: distracting themselves into oblivion and clicking onyet another funny dog video while the greatest minds in history lie dormant at their fingertips.
Technology is either a catalyst for creation or a slippery slope into intellectual erosion. AI works just the same. It will either destroy education or become the greatest learning tool ever invented. Kids will either use it to cheat or become a genius.
There is no in-between.
Wrongful use of AI is already infiltrating the classroom
Remember when cheating required effort? When you had to slip cash to the kid who actually did the reading, or trade your lunch for the study guide with all the correct answers? Now, it only takes a few words and a prompt box. And we already know that kids are taking full advantage of this.
26% of K-12 teachers have already caught a student cheating with ChatGPT. Roughly one in ten papers are submitted containing at least 20% AI-generated content. 56% of college students have used AI on an assignment or exam.
Believe it or not, I don’t think AI is the problem here. There’s a deeper issue — why do kids want to cheat in the first place? A few reasons:
Kids don’t care about the material
Kids feel underprepared for the material.
(As well as the suffocating pressure of “getting the A,” but that’s another conversation!)
Both reasons indicate something is amiss in the classroom. But in the traditional teacher-in-front-of-the-classroom model, not much can be done. Kids cannot receive the one-on-one attention they need, nor do they learn to mastery (which unlocks their motivation to learn and grow). So, most kids stay bored or fall behind. The convenient thing to do in both scenarios is reach for ChatGPT.
It is not AI, but the wrongful use of AI, that is posing such a threat. And the heart, the core, the epicenter of this misuse is an educational model that does not accurately prepare or challenge kids for the future. Which means, ironically enough, AI itself can be the solution to its own problem.
