AI: The Dawn of a New Era?
Written By: Zhaohan Zhang
For years now, the idea of this perfect AI has been perceived as the peak of human technological advancement and computing, so is it not unbelievable that AI is one of the fastest-growing technological industries in modern times? We are closer and closer to the perfect AI engineers that scientists dream of, and it all started 85 years ago with Alan Turing's Bombe machine used to decode the German Enigma. This paper will ultimately talk about general artificial intelligence, the use of AI in the education system, and how it can be both beneficial and detrimental in its current state.
AI is one of the world's largest and fastest-growing online tools, the most used being ChatGPT is visited on average 3.7 billion times monthly. What are sites like ChatGPT used for specifically? ChatGPT, our most prominent example, is a type of generative AI; by using the internet as its data set, you can ask ChatGPT to help organize or locate sources for research. Along with its giant data set of the whole internet, except sources specified not to be used, ChatGPT and most other AI also use you as a source. The questions and statements you feed ChatGPT become a part of its data set, so not only is it taking a majority of the data from the internet, but it's also receiving the 3.7 billion questions and statements it uses to create its answers, truly highlighting its variety.
Along with this fantastic ability, there are also significant downsides; inherently, AI is new, and its operation is still simple. Yes, it takes plenty of sources from online and uses user-trained data, but this has downsides. For one, most AI can't differentiate between a safe source and a bad source; it's the same with the data it collects from people. Currently, Artificial intelligence can be tricked; it isn't advanced enough to make those determinations; it simply collects data and then repurposes it.
There are also other applicable uses for AI, not just generative. AI can also be used as a form of assistance and automation. The simplest example of AI Assistance is Siri, which merged with Apple's new Apple Intelligence to create an AI virtual Assistant using AI to simplify notifications and your everyday tasks and uses based on your daily activities. This leads to another of the most common uses and ideas for AI: automation. In the modern day, before the use of AI, automation already existed, with many machines finishing simple combinations to create a product. However, the sort of automation achievable with AI is streamlined with even less machines to build products significantly faster. Still, there's also digital automation to assist with business or finances; feeding data into an AI program spits out pattern-recognized trends of what might happen with decent accuracy, helping make business far less tedious.
Well, what's the downside or the negative? There really isn’t one source of technology being applied today that isn’t super effective, but the way we get there is what causes an issue. Currently, there is no actual legislation providing any limitation on AI or the development thereof; that's why there have been so many issues with AI recently because there's nothing to restrict it; an example would be art or deepfakes, it doesn't take into consideration the likeness of individuals or the copyright and trademarks on anything creating a multitude or issues regarding legal rights. The development of AI currently is just the Wild West. At the same time, the growth can be fast and impressive, but it can also be severely harmful and dangerous for many areas.
How does this apply to the world of education? To start with students, the use of AI helps with organizing and researching for papers. With its extensive data set, it's similar to googling something but much faster. It simplifies using a search engine because you don't need to search for your evidence as hard. Most AI can site where they receive the information itself, cementing itself as a valuable resource. AI can also provide substantial assistance with finding solutions. Mathematics is one of the subjects students hate the most because it can be hard to understand, AI makes learning significantly more straightforward as it can show you the steps of solving an equation and break it down to be easier to understand. Suppose AI keeps evolving in the education system. In that case, we're looking at an increase in personalized teaching and more individualized learning, which can be significantly more beneficial to the individual student. So, for students, AI is a fantastic tool for finding a wide variety of resources and is a powerful teaching tool.
With teachers or faculty, the use of AI can play a role in assistance. This can be in lesson planning, creating more extensive lessons, or even more specialized lessons for individual students. It can also handle many simple or tedious tasks, like grading papers or essays. While it can be seen as the job of teachers and faculty being taken over, the use of AI is regulated. It depends on how the faculty chooses, so it's more of an assistant, and it provides more time for the teachers to have one-on-one teaching or assist students in education and provide more detailed answers. With faculty, it's a way to create tasks simpler as a virtual assistant.
Taking into consideration all these good aspects of AI, we can explore the bad. First, we need to talk about how AI is mainly used. Unfortunately, the primary use of AI has been cheating. More specifically, the generation of essays and speeches. The power of AI is immense, but people abuse it. They don't use it properly by finding sources; instead, they use it to construct an already generated piece of work that is easy to detect and puts the students at risk. It also sets a bad example of using AI within the school system. For faculty, it's just confirmed that teachers haven't adopted the use of AI as an assistant, whether that be from the generally bad track record or its status, as it is still pretty new.
The growth of AI has been rapid, which is very apparent, and it isn't going to stop anytime soon. So whether or not you view AI as something that can be used as a tool or see it as a device for cheating, or maybe you view the perfect AI taking over the world, it doesn't change the fact that AI will continue to change and evolve.