Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used in more places than ever, but the classroom should not be one of them. Of the many ways students can use AI, almost all of them are harmful to their education. AI tools are not consistent enough to be used in classroom work.
Students should not use AI to help with their homework or studies, as it is not consistently correct and often presents misinformation as fact. There are even studies like the ones used in an article by Tim Marcin, titled “AI search tools are comfortably wrong a lot of the time that show these tools will give false information about 60 percent of the time.”
AI is not something that can be trusted to give and use truthful information. The only good use of AI for students is automation, but only in an extremely limited scope that is not worth the time to set up, such as turning in work more quickly. Beyond the issue of AI's incorrectness, students often don’t learn anything from having AI do their work for them.
AI is a more useful tool for educators because they can benefit more from its automation capabilities. Although AI should not be used by teachers to grade their students' assignments. This is attributed to AI’s lack of human judgment and its potential to promote biases while failing to provide the proper feedback a student needs to learn. If the teacher isn’t grading their students, they will not know their students’ progress or mistakes. This dampens their ability to address the issues effectively. Even using AI to generate questions for assignments is not very effective because it often leads to repeating answers or questions that could decrease the student’s confidence.
AI is disastrous and should be avoided for any task that requires judgement like sharing information, creating questions for tests, assignments and grading. The AI industry is a bubble that will pop, and the fallout will be less disastrous if it happens sooner. By not giving money to AI companies the bubble is likely to pop sooner. AI is an ineffective tool for the classroom environment and should be avoided by teachers and students.
