Should Students Use AI?

Should Students Use AI

The growing presence of AI in education and whether students should use AI in their academic work has been a topic StealthGPT has long covered. We've seen the answer to the question evolve with the times where, at first, academia's AI policy was a hard no with zero tolerance.

Today though, so much has changed in both the AI landscape and higher education as a results of students not being able to be stopped from utilizing the available AI tools and campuses feeling the cost of restrictive AI policies that transformed many of their classrooms into climates of suspicion.

Whether or not students should use AI taps into one of the central philosophical debates regarding integrating AI into our daily lives. Perhaps some work is better left never being automated. Traditional thinking is that doing your schoolwork instills the next generation with the values and developmental faculties they will need to succeed in the professional world.

The problem with that thinking though, is that AI will force the world as we know it to break from many traditions, including how we learn and we function in the professional world after higher education.

Most people would condemn AI usage that breaches academic integrity like straight-up AI plagiarism involving generative AI essays with no human involvement. However, it's much harder to make the case against AI study tools that leverage AI systems to make flash cards, study guides, quizzes, and to generally make information learned in courses easier to access, learn, and memorize.

In the beginning of the AI revolution, higher education institutions were so tunnel-vision-focused on ensuring that AI in the classroom was banned that they threw the baby out wit the bathwater and didn't give students all the available tools to succeed. As it turns out, AI can help students learn so long as the AI powered solutions are given the right role.

So, as attitudes toward artificial intelligence changed and AI usage in academics was around 86% of the student population, schools could no longer disregard the application of AI for schoolwork. Colleges soon adopted AI driven solutions for teaching students, research, and managing enrollment, yet the final hurtle was letting students use AI technology in their schoolwork.

Educational AI Making Headlines

To truly signal the times are a-changin', two news story broke that caught our attention. First, the Leon County School District is set to vote on new AI policy which authorizes AI for such instances as: research assistance, data analysis, translation, grammar and spelling corrections, and enhancing learning experiences for disabled students.

Second, Northeastern University, which has always had one of the more progressive stances on AI, partnered with Anthropic to introduce Claude as the official campus AI system. Using AI in college now has mainstream acceptance with this news, and one should only expect more higher education institutions to follow in Northeastern's footsteps.

Benefits to Using Generative AI in School

For both teaching and learning, AI enabled improvements can be studied and measured. These Improvements simply depend on the type of AI systems colleges let their students use.

We shouldn't be asking "can college students use AI?". We should be asking, "how can students use AI best in school?".

Here are just some of the benefits to higher education that integrating generative AI tools might have:

• Improved learning outcomes for student body.

• Personalized learning for students wit unique needs or learning processes.

• Ability to access a learning environment anywhere students can speak to an AI chatbot.

• Using AI becomes part of a student's professional development once more businesses implement AI technology.

• Learn about performing tasks AI is incapable of.

Conclusion

Should students use AI? Absolutely. Academics might be making too much of this idea that using AI for schoolwork hinders a person's development given we might not even be living in the same world within a few years of this technology's full integration.

Learning how to use AI technology and how to make yourself irreplaceable is just as important for new generations as instilling in them the virtues of hard work. The sooner AI is embraced, the sooner we will see it makes leaps forward in the learning outcomes of all students.

A technology with the ability to let students learn in their unique ways, that answers their unique needs in real time, and gives them access to massive amounts of information, can only help students grow into more intelligent professionals.

The message sent to young people by academic institutions attempting to restrict AI usage is that change should be feared. And given the mindset of most young people, students cannot identify with fear-based reasoning and will only see the positive side of useful shortcuts.

If you answer "no" to "should students use AI?" Prepare yourself to experience some blowback.