ChatGPT (AI) is NOT Good for College Education
ChatGPT (AI) may be good for getting information quickbut it does not teach critical thinking skills and problem-solving skills, which a college student needs to have in order to prepare for the real worldas Jenna Lyle of the New York City Department of Education pointed out (Heaven). The fact is many are lauding AI and ChatGPT in particular as being tools that will enhance college education. The reality is that it is just a convenience tool that deprives one of actually conducting real research and figuring things out for oneself.
Villasenor does not agree: he says that to remain competitive throughout their careers, students need to learn how to prompt an AI writing tool to elicit worthwhile output and know how to evaluate its quality, accuracy and originality. But is that true? Why is this going to be a skilled required of them in the real world? ChatGPT is little more than a glorified Google search engine: you can ask it a question and it will give you a standard consensus-driven response. What it will not do is challenge you to think outside the box, question narratives, innovate, or criticize a text. It is simply a way to get learners to accept a standardized response as though it were dogma. ChatGPT will make students laziernot smarter or give them a greater competitive edge in the marketplace. Villasenor thinks that ChatGPT is the futurebut anyone who has used it since it was released has seen the quality of responses deteriorate over time; the novelty has worn off quite a bit, and...
But what do they really offer that Google does not already do? The AI-generated responses are generic and formulaic. The
syntax is almost always the same. There is no life or soul in the text. There is no depth to the reasoning or the responses. Everything it spits out is superficial as though it came straight from Wikipedia (at best). This is supposed to be something that is good for college students? That gives them an edge? That will be counted as a 21st century skill by employers? More...
…that we challenge ourselves, and that we constantly strive to improve. This kind of effort cannot be outsourced to software, no matter how advanced or sophisticated it may be. And anyone who is relying on or using that software is taking shortcuts that will in the end harm more than it will hurt. That is because relying on such software robs us of the opportunity to develop our own ideas, to form our own
connections, to bridge gaps that we see with our own eyes and intellect, and to make discoveries that human reasoning is so apt to make at times. ChatGPT and AI in general simply makes us passive consumers of information, rather than active participants in our own
learning. That is the fundamental reason why ChatGPT and AI are not good for college education. They are tools for getting around having to actually do the manual work. They will be used by studentsbut not to gain any other advantage in college other than a few more minutes that can be spent on activities other than that for which they turned to ChatGPT in the first…
