Image sourced from Rho Sigma Omega Website.
Rho Sigma Omega (STEAM Honors Society) Essay Competition Winner, 2024, written by Mary Beth Wright.
Artificial Intelligence: the Ethics in Education
For centuries, humans have sown the seeds of technological innovation. This crop has yielded knowledge as well as tools that we’ve now integrated into our daily lives — the radio, the television, the internet — and in our current season, artificial intelligence. It is human nature (and the nature of science itself) that once a point is crossed, it is irreversible: knowledge can only be gained, not taken away. With artificial intelligence being so accessible already, its effects have trickled down into foundational facets of our society, particularly concerning young people and education. This widespread engagement with AI will only help to improve it. Depending on how it’s used, it will either catapult us into a dystopian future like in Pixar’s WALL-E or Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”, or genuinely help society. The former is more likely — and as a young student, a member of the generation facing a future dominated by AI, it is my responsibility to help ensure that this new technology is being used ethically. Education is, after all, fundamental in influencing how we use technology as it (and we) progresses.
Artificial intelligence is a tool like any other. A hammer may be used to build, but it also has the ability to destroy. With such technology at minors’ disposal, many are inclined to abuse it — particularly to “destroy” original thought and genuine effort. Cheating has run rampant through classrooms, as well as unornamented plagiarism. Some students even let bots like ChatGPT write their papers for them. This creates students who have no real skills or knowledge. To counter this, we must restrict queries that answer blatant questions. Instead, we should encourage using AI to learn how to do something and then to apply it. This is a responsible and productive way to use artificial intelligence.
This principle of putting in zero effort is, in itself, unfair. It’s essentially a metaphorical slap in the face to the students who pour time and energy into each assignment, project, or paper. One could apply the same concept to the creation of art in any medium. Artists, who put pieces of themselves into their work, giving it humanity, are replaced by a soulless machine, exploiting bits of real people’s work to create media. This, both in the domains of art and academics, has made the controversial issue of plagiarism and the importance of original human thought a contemporary debate. Minimizing young people’s ability to access tools that allow them to create papers, or stories, or works of art will help to preserve both the humanity in art and culture and our very own humanity.
There is also, of course, the issue of privacy, which tends to come up in discussing the internet. The robot is learning from the information that it’s given — and what it takes, too. We have already learned that we can’t trust social media websites such as Facebook with our personal information. The algorithms that are used on such apps are really a kind of artificial intelligence themselves. They collect information which developers have access to and disperse in several ways. This is why as the pool of artificial intelligence apps and software grows, we should continue to be mindful of what information we are giving these robots to learn about us.
It is true that artificial intelligence is improving and slowly integrating into our society. However, it is on us to ensure that how it is utilized in our everyday lives is a way that is not exploitative, unfair, or unsafe to young people and the rest of mankind.