Artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, was not meant to be used to cheat through highschool, whether it be small assignments or an entire essay. Instead, artificial intelligence was meant to stimulate creativity, serve as a study buddy, or be an interesting tool for human curiosity. 

Many students, including myself sometimes (no matter how much I don’t want to admit it), are letting AI tools like ChatGPT think for themselves and do assignments that we are fully capable of doing. The punchline is that we are letting a machine think for ourselves. Highschool introduces assignments and projects that help us, as students, gain skills that we can use for the rest of our lives (for example, giving presentations in your job or when your boss gives you a task to complete that can be similar to the assignments we receive in school). Writing essays helps us become stronger writers and more argumentative. Reading and answering questions given in assignments helps us learn. Letting AI do this type of work for us doesn’t allow us to develop the skills necessary for highschool and life afterward. 

Why is this such an important problem at Ridge?

In Ridge High School, the use of AI is only becoming worse, and the biggest problem of it all is that everyone is ashamed to bring it up. One day, I was on my chromebook in the PAC when I got bored and looked around to see AI, such as ChatGPT, open to help them complete an assignment. I do admit that I have become lazy this year as well — I’ve used ChatGPT to help me, one time using it to aid an essay outline (not a very proud moment of mine). However, it has become second-nature to use ChatGPT or another source of AI for something academics-related. When we are first assigned something in class, we turn to talk to one another, and a prevalent topic that comes up first is, “I’m just going to use ChatGPT for it when I go home.” For the rest of the period, we don’t even try to complete it by ourselves. This can be a bit of an over exaggeration, but from what I’ve seen, this often happens at Ridge. My point is that students are all turning to AI instead of trying to do assignments on our own, which definitely isn’t the point of the assignments we are given to do on our own. 

And unfortunately, it’s more than school. The problem of overusing AI has become worse. Even some journalists and writers are starting to use AI to write novels or articles for them. People are starting to abandon their natural creativity with the idea of perfectionism, thinking that AI can make their point much more clearer. Natural creativity is a need and should definitely not be replaced with the unnatural work of AI. The ability to write novels is such a talent that shouldn’t be masked by the use of AI. To write a novel, the thought of using a robot to write it sounds so unnatural and sickening to me. 

What we’re all wondering: Should Ridge ban ChatGPT?

This is a question that haunts a lot of people I know, including myself. It’s a question that lingers in the hallways. We can’t ban ChatGPT – I’m not saying for my personal benefit or anyone else’s – but if the school does ban ChatGPT, it will be an instant withdrawal for students. After using ChatGPT for almost everything – assignments, study questions, using it like a search engine, and for a plethora of academic purposes, students will collectively have a fallout. After relying heavily on something, suddenly losing it won’t result in anything better. Students will only try to find other alternatives to help them with assignments and homework, with many of us failing to see that we can use something we will always had access to – our brains. 

What should we individually do?

That’s an amazing question! I am starting to use ChatGPT way less than how much I was using it in – let’s say – January. I started to feel guilty with my laziness and decided to become more strict with myself when completing schoolwork, no matter what it was. I would sit with it and persevere without turning to AI tools like ChatGPT, and I suppose I had to force myself to get out of this bad habit. Overtime, isolating myself from these tools started to work and I was doing well individually on my assignments. As long as you put your mind to something, it can be achieved! I suppose the most simple way to say this is that we all should slowly rely on AI less, especially for assignments where it’s not your own individual work, like taking baby steps. It’ll be difficult to complete assignments on your own at first, but I guarantee you that it is possible to return to the student you were before turning to AI like ChatGPT. AI isn’t a completely bad thing, however AI shouldn’t be doing your own work for you.

How should we use AI? 

Although artificial intelligence can be villainous against the human mind, AI isn’t a monster. At the same time, AI shouldn’t be used to think for you but instead be a helpful tool! Here’s how I use AI, whether it be for school or anything else:

• Formulate questions to quiz you on a subject, or take your lecture and help explain a concept 
• Give you example essays on a different topic (to see how your essay should be formatted) – this is the only thing I would ever ‘use’ AI for in regards to an essay. I don’t view this as a bad thing – example essays can always help us. 
• Creating images for anything! It’s actually quite cool what AI can do. 

While I have mentioned how we are letting a machine think for us, this was never the point of artificial intelligence. Sources of AI were not meant to help us cheat through highschool,assignments, or tasks,but rather something that can help us study and fuel our curiosity. As a reminder, the point of highschool and giving us tasks and assignments is to help us gain skills such as writing strong papers and using our skills of reading, writing, and problem-solving. Letting artificial intelligence complete these tasks for us blocks our ability to develop the skills our schools want us to develop to ultimately benefit us for the rest of our lives. We should not exploit a tool invented for curiosity to our own advantage. We have to learn to rely solely on our minds and not simply use it as a secondary source!