Once, completing an assignment took hours and hours of studying; now it can be done in minutes. How? Ask any student who has this experience. The reply will be “AI did it for me!”
Over time, academics are becoming increasingly dependent on AI. It has become a constant companion for students, mostly not used in an efficient way, but as a shortcut. Very useful AI tools are now being highly misused, making them shortcut learning machines. Over-reliance on tools hinders their ability to learn, research and think independently. Using AI is not inherently bad; in fact, AI is powerful. However, not knowing how to make proper use of it is a significant limitation for anyone living in the present.
If focusing on the problem, AI is not the problem. The main problem is being too lazy to learn, know and efficiently use tools. Most students are directly copying and pasting from AI platforms. Many of them do not even insert the prompts carefully. So, what happens is, AI gives points on the overall topic, without precisely focusing on what is needed. Students paste the structured points that AI provided.
But some of them know about the ‘AI Detected’ issue; they do not directly copy-paste, but they are not great learners and do not do complete research for their work. They might summarise the points given by AI, rewrite them, and add synonyms, but they only provide the information that the AI provided. The problem here is, they do not know various sources from where they might get more in-depth knowledge about the subject. Thus, the credibility and information-rich books, articles, journals, research papers and original sources are being overlooked. A generation is being in a position where their curiosity to know is jeopardised, and they do not value deep understanding as well as thinking critically. This leads to losing academic honesty, research skills, and originality.
AI should be used as a mentor, a guiding tool, which does not replace the learning ability of anyone but enhances it. There are ways of proper usage of it, which need to be applied to anyone who is using AI and wants to achieve great outcomes with it.
Tools can be used for generating ideas. If AI is asked about generating ideas for a course’s assignment, a free write-up, or even for a fieldwork, AI will very fast approach several ideas.
AI tools are also very useful while organising any assignment on the topic, including what information the writer wants to include in it.
There are extensive huge documents that need to be studied. AI can give the overall idea of the main theme, the included sections, summarise the complicated texts, as well as explain various theories and details. AI also provides the main sources it took the key points from. By looking into sources, one can gather more elaborate knowledge.
More on various translations, editing, rewriting, and getting to know the meanings of critical things, AI can help significantly. All this usage saves time and makes a great improvement.
AI can be any student’s anchor, depending on how they make use of it. Copy-pasting and overdependency on it are not making any good. But if they know the great outcomes it can provide, by learning how to use it and giving precise prompts, they will make a great change in the long run. To make a good change for this issue, there should be emphasis on AI Literacy. This will help with properly operating with AI, making it use more professionally and smartly.
AI will not take control over everything if we become correctly involved in our activities. Enriching our knowledge and creativity are very important and needs to be seen. And in this, AI can be our companion who makes our work more organised and easier, but does not take control of us. Each student should keep this in mind to improve further in the future.
*Tasmia Sistri is a final year student of Media Studies and Journalism at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh