Artificial intelligence, better known as AI, has raised several concerns about what are considered honest and dishonest usages of the online tool. It can be beneficial to save time taking notes or recommending better vocabulary words in certain sentences. However, it makes the internet a dangerous place, simply because you can rely on AI generators like ChatGPT to find information published or researched by other individuals.
Plagiarizing other people’s essays is an extremely dishonest use of AI and is one of the biggest issues surrounding this new technology. However, AI is also used in platforms that are not considered honest, such as Grammarly, which enhances your vocabulary, makes word choice suggestions and fixes grammar to make a sentence flow more smoothly. Without a doubt, these uses of AI can be easily identified as either dishonest or honest.
But what about those AI-generated paraphrasing and summarizing websites that students use as a shortcut for assignments? Students are encouraged to write notes in their own words, but some just let the paraphraser do all the work for them. I understand the time and effort that it could take to reinvent a sentence just for it to have the same meaning as the information you just read. In some instances, people use AI-generated summarizers when their word count just barely exceeds the limit. Rather than tweaking and shortening sentences, they just type their sentences into a summarizer and get results almost instantly.
This is where the line between dishonest and honest becomes confusing. Students may argue that they do not see the need to put in extra effort that a computer can do for them. Simply rewording a sentence or shortening the text can take away from time spent on more important assignments. The text will have the same meaning regardless of the fact that it is AI-generated.
Another questionable usage of AI is using it to brainstorm ideas for college applications. As long as someone is not copying other people’s ideas, it should be a useful tool to ease the pressure off of applying. The problem is that if a student gets admitted into a college with an essay topic that was AI-generated, they could live with that guilt for the rest of their lives. They were admitted for an essay that did not fully embody who they were as a person and simply typed “Hey ChatGPT. Please find college essay ideas for me.”
AI has taken over the world and it is not surprising that students have started using it to help them save time to focus on other commitments. Its advanced features have raised concerns about the future of artificial intelligence and how much we can trust people’s work moving forward.
