Over the past few years AI has hit college campuses like a storm. Now more than ever, students have the ability to answer pretty much any question that they could think of. With the numerous AI assistants and different AI models being created everyday, there continue to be more and more AI sources for students, and they keep getting better. While the ethics revolving around AI are contemplated and discussed daily by everyone on the internet, it is widely known and accepted that students shouldn’t use AI resources for their work. However this may not always be true in practice.

Within education AI brings up the issue with the basics of learning. Instead of researching, taking notes, and going over data, so that you can learn the material, many students often resort to using certain AI models to help them answer questions on their homework. Instead of working through the course material and using their brain to actually learn, many are simply trying to get their work done so that they can meet their deadlines. This creates an environment where students don’t show up to class with the intention to learn. Students start seeing school as a sequence of tasks to get done, and they choose the easiest way to complete them.

While using AI for schoolwork is generally frowned upon, many students actually tend to use AI in some form or another. While using AI as the main and most predominant tool for school work is still wrong, many students happen to use AI when making simple Google searches, to no fault of their own. One of our very own students here at COS, Achilles Sierra, stated “…it’s more of a necessity than it is a tool to cheat,”. Sierra is stating this, not in the sense that he’s admitting to plagiarism or fraudulent schoolwork, but in the sense that he’s being an honest student. Sierra relays that when he’s doing his schoolwork, sometimes the answer isn’t so clear from his textbook or a specific article, and in that case he would take his specific question

to Google. While simply making an innocent search to help get his work done, the google AI assistant would be the first result and there would be the answer he had been looking for. I can imagine that a great deal of COS students can relate to this unique detail. While not intentionally using AI for research, a simple Google result ending up with the perfect sought after answer is so valuable. So even while just looking up a question or a certain fact, many find that they’re using AI without even fully realizing. The convenience and ease of AI search results is unmatched. Rather than flipping through chapters of a textbook looking for a specific definition, a simple Google result can give you what you’re looking for. And with the modern day integration of AI in our search engines, it’s only going to become more common for AI to be used as a sort of filter and organizer of data for search results