It is not a secret that AI, artificial intelligence, has become both influential and prevalent in various fields of significance, such as healthcare, finance, and transportation, in recent years. The tool has helped expedite and reinvent the processes involved in many occupations, as it becomes increasingly accessible and easy to maneuver. However, AI usage in Townsend Harris High School has been of most concern as of late. As both teachers and students alike have, undeniably, had AI integrated into their lives.
The use of AI chatbots and tools has grown in popularity as the technology evolves and improves; chatbots can generate responses based on the user’s prompts.However, the Townsend Harris School-Wide Grading Policy is staunchly against the use of AI in any assignments, explicitly stating in the policy that “The first time a student is found to have cheated, plagiarized, and/or used AI to complete an assignment, in full or in part, they will have the opportunity to redo the assignment (or and equal, alternative assignment at the teacher’s discretion) for a maximum grade of 75. Any future academically dishonest assignments will receive a grade of 0.”
THE CONS
English teacher Kevin McDonaugh said, “Using AI to generate ideas is plagiarism. It synthesizes information already on the internet, suited to the writer’s needs. So, AI cuts out the writer’s process of gathering and synthesizing information.” While AI can simplify tasks, it may also be detrimental to the user to some extent.
English teacher Aseefa Rasool also shares a similar stance on AI, believing that the implementation of AI into schoolwork makes students less confident in their abilities. “I am worried that [students] are not trusting themselves enough to use their own words and ideas.” She says that using AI also prevents teachers from “assessing students accurately” since teachers “do not know what ideas [belong to them or AI].”
The increasing dependency on AI among students has become a significant concern for both students and teachers.Mr. McDonaugh said, “We are always looking for ways to make our lives easier, and thinking and writing is not easy– it is where we are confronted with our own limitations– but this is also how and where we grow. Without these confrontations, we create an illusion of learning, curiosity, and personal transformation.”
When asked about what skills students could lose by using AI to complete school work, freshman Alyssa Gogasaid that students could lose the ability to solve problems on their own. She also agreed on the dependence students have with AI, saying that, “The habit of using AI instead of trying to solve the problem at hand could be very well relied on.” In similarity to this sentiment, Sophomore Kaylee Oh said, “by overusing AI we become dependent on it for things that should be not necessarily easy but what we gotta work for.”
Another major concern regarding AI being used for schoolwork is its tendency to provide incorrect or biased information, such as the stating of an incorrect date and/or name when generating a written response for a student’s history work. Junior Nathan Ramprashad said, “[Students] will think they’re learning something that’s right when it’s just totally wrong.” The unreliability of AI has been subject to scrutiny, as the databases and sources utilized by the software have come out to be biased and misinterpreted. Senior Ian You also said, “if students abuse AI and simply rely on it as an answer key, it can severely hinder learning”
THE PROS
One potential benefit of using AI is that it can be used as a studying and learning aid. Alyssa said, “It’s very simple to ask AI to explain terms in a more summarized way that’s easier to comprehend.” Moreover, Ian said, “AI can provide in-depth steps on how to accomplish a task for the student to eventually find patterns and implement without its help…AI [can be] used in math to check answers or to find inspiration on how to solve difficult questions using specified methods students may be learning in class.”
Adding on, Junior Mikayla Fong said, “AI can definitely help us dumb down passages of information to make it easier for us to understand, but at the same time, it could do too much work for us which can cause us to not really take in the information.”
The use of AI for more menial tasks is less consequential, and some may consider it a beneficiary reason for using the tool. As Mr. McDonaugh said, “for performing perfunctory tasks, [AI] has its place.”
Alyssa said, “AI could impact my peers’ learning because it would give them less pressure in studying on their own or completing their school/home work by themselves.”
Opinions on AI vary widely among teachers and students at Townsend Harris.. Ms. Rasool said, “We can have conversations around AI and how we can use this tool as a resource for brainstorming and how we can use what we get from AI to form our own thoughts and ideas.”
Mr. McDonaugh said, “Our ability to recognize and interpret symbols is part of what makes us human, so to ask a robot to do that is to give away what makes us unique individuals with our own perspectives.”
