By: Ogunleye Moboluwarin
Damiloju, a 200-level student studying physiotherapy at the University of Ibadan, had academic difficulties. You see, in addition to her regular schoolwork, she also had a side business where she painted on commission and sold the paintings to her classmates and anybody else who was interested. Due to her hectic job schedule, she often fell behind on assignments and failed to fully understand the concepts presented in class. She had heard about artificial intelligence and figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a try. She made the decision to employ Todoist, an artificial intelligence that assists in organizing study sessions by dividing work into more digestible chunks. After some time with it, she decided to incorporate AI into her company by having NightCafe creators make artwork on commission.
The story above is an example of our slow, but gradual descent in artificial intelligence dependency by students. Since Chatgpt broke out and became more and more popular, as mentioned above, artificial intelligence can prove to be of good use to students, in ways such as using tools such as Todoist, Tara.ai, Trevor AI, and my study tracker to help them track study times and activities. They help students set study goals, monitor their performance, analyze their data, and balance their work and academic life. Furthermore, we all know how difficult it is sometimes to find specific information on search engines like Google and Bing. With AI, students can more easily locate credible resources, ignore irrelevant material, and distill important concepts from complex texts. This reduces study time as instead of searching through different websites on Google and getting distracted by either the targeted ads on the sites or the eye-catching headlines by the sides of the web pages, you can just load up Chatgpt, Bard, or Jasper AI, inquire about the information you need and get it that specific information almost immediately.
Also, for students with businesses. Artificial intelligence helps out in a number of ways, and in different areas of the business. For example, chat-bots, voice assistants, and recommendation systems are just a few examples of how artificial intelligence (AI) is helping businesses improve their customer care and support. Customers can use these tools to get responses to their inquiries, fixes to their problems, and tailored recommendations. Customer retention, satisfaction, and loyalty can all increase in this way. It also helps automate processes such as data entry, invoicing, payroll, and reporting, which saves time and allows you to do other things in the available time.
Another thing is the practise of having artificial intelligence bots complete assignments. Students are increasingly able to circumvent the need to really learn the topic by completing their assignments with the assistance of bots that are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), as this technology continues to advance and more AI-powered applications become widely available. This may appear to be a simple approach for students to save time and effort on the surface, but in reality, it is a severe concern for a number of reasons. To begin, it would be counterproductive to education to have artificial intelligence bots perform one’s schoolwork. It is not the purpose of students’ homework to merely provide answers without understanding the questions or topics being covered in class; rather, the purpose of homework is to reinforce the concepts that students are learning in class. When we get their schoolwork done by artificial intelligence bots, we are robbing ourselves of an important educational opportunity.
In addition, the use of AI bots to complete one’s homework establishes a potentially disastrous standard. From this, you learn that they do not need to put in the effort and hard work that is required for success and that they can get by with taking shortcuts and cheating their way through school. This mentality can be carried over into other aspects of their lives, which can result in a lack of desire as well as a lack of skills that are applicable in the real world. To add to that, the vast majority of laborious and repetitive work can now be automated thanks to A.I. applications. Because we do not need to commit information to memory or figure out complex riddles in order to complete the task at hand, we have a tendency to engage our brains less and less. This unhealthy dependence on AI may present challenges for future generations. Also, artificial intelligence has the potential to lessen the importance of human connection and social contact, both of which are vital to learning and growth. Pupils could become overly reliant on AI and miss out on opportunities to work together with their classmates and teachers, as well as to build skills in critical thinking and problem-solving. Another danger is that, because it requires access to personal and sensitive information from students and teachers, artificial intelligence (AI) can create certain privacy and data security concerns. There is a possibility that data could be stolen, mishandled, or manipulated by dishonest persons or biased algorithms.
In conclusion, the topic of artificial intelligence (AI), which is rapidly expanding, has several potential uses in the educational sector. Students can benefit from employing AI technologies to assist their learning, such as personalized tutoring, adaptive assessment, feedback generation, and content creation. These tools can be found on platforms like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. However, there are also several pitfalls and obstacles related to the use of AI in education, such as ethical issues, concerns around privacy, data quality, human-AI interaction, and social and emotional abilities. We should therefore use AI with caution and awareness. AI has the potential to be a helpful companion for students on their educational path, but it cannot take the place of the human aspect in teaching.
