Note: For Part I of this post, visit “Students’ Views on AI in College, Part 1.”
Given the prevalence of AI in college since Chat GPT and generative AI emerged at the end of 2022, I had my students in “Selected World Literatures” (ENG 580) read three articles on AI and the decline in reading levels during the first week of classes, after which they wrote short reflections on whether AI was more harmful or beneficial for their major and fields (most of them are English or Secondary English Education majors). The write-ups were not graded, and I encouraged them to share their honest perspectives freely. I am sharing their insights in this blog post.
Here are the articles they read for class and that we discussed before they wrote their reflections:
- “AI is making reading books feel obsolete” (The Conversation)
- “ChatGPT may be eroding critical thinking skills” (Time)
- “Thinking is becoming a luxury good” (New York Times)
— Anuja Madan, Associate Professor
Zoe Coffman, Senior, Secondary Education English. I think that AI is more harmful than it is beneficial. For many college students, it is efficiency and convenience that draws them to using AI. Students don’t really think that AI could be used for good or even that it is a helpful study tool but they know it will help get an assignment done so they can move on to something that is “more worth their time.” The problem is that the use of AI is prohibiting students from diving deeply into their studies and is rather allowing them to simply coast by. As a future English teacher, I am scared about what is happening because my students will not remember a world where AI was not a hot topic in the classroom. Young students are drawn to AI and the more that they use it, the less willing they are to do the work themselves and contribute to their own education. In the same way we are more likely to pull out our phone for a calculator than a pen and paper to perform long division, students are more likely to pull out AI to outline their essays than type it themselves. Students are becoming less willing to do the work and will soon become less able. The dangers of AI are as real and powerful as the allures of it are.
Megan Morrison, Junior, English Literature. It is a strange time to be an English Major. I chose this path because I greatly value people, their words, and emotions. Also, I am a huge book nerd. I love my classwork as it includes sharing ideas with peers and instructors through discussions, close analysis of literature, and writing. The use of AI in my major frightens me because I fear it will result in a diminishing of the connection students have with their instructors and peers. An essential part of being an English Major, in my opinion, is connecting with others through your personal words, opinions, and feelings. To me, there is little room for AI in the study of English literature, specifically. I feel that we owe full engagement to the authors who have written the works we study. Each word they wrote came together to create these stories and only by reading each closely can we fully understand the different meanings of a work. AI can be used to summarize works of literature, and it can provide quick answers to forgotten details or ideas or concepts to include in our studies; it is easy to obtain a full summary of a piece of writing from AI. But basing our studies on these summaries will result in missing out on the most important takeaways we get from reading and studying literature. I am afraid of what the continued development of AI will mean for the study of literature.
Allison Arnold, Junior, Secondary Education English Major: I believe A.I. can be useful for starting points for new ideas when beginning research for projects or even essays. A.I. is also becoming more widely used and promoted in certain career paths, like construction surveying. It is important that A.I.’s positive usages are acknowledged. However, when it comes to higher education specifically, A.I. tends to do more harm than good. The point of universities is that the student gains a particular set of skills based on the career path(s) they have chosen. It is hoped that the student will remain in the career they have chosen for the majority of their life. If a student relies on A.I. to write entire papers, finish projects, and answer tests, that student will not gain a full skill set. Rather, the student would have far less knowledge and experience than others who have chosen the same or similar paths, leaving the student behind. This lack does not stop at the individual. American society as a whole would be affected. Future philosophers, designers, and inventors will be lost due to A.I. performing tasks for them, leaving nothing but dullness for the users’ brains.
Marika Peterson, Junior, Secondary English Education, ENGL 580: Each class I have taken at KSU has had a different approach to AI usage. Some professors ban it completely, while others encourage or even require its use on certain assignments. In my opinion, LLMs such as ChatGPT cause much more harm than good. I want to clarify that I think AI usage is beneficial in some contexts, like in the medical field. My sister, an RN, told me that AI is used to detect slight abnormalities in cardiac rhythms that humans might have a hard time catching. However, in fields such as education and English, its use is harder to justify. When I am a teacher, it will be an expectation of mine that my students use their own creativity when writing. So, I think it is only fair that I also don’t use AI on my assignments. I want to use my creativity and critical thinking skills, and I want to encourage my future students to do the same.
Alexia Bouslog, Junior, Psychology & Human Health Biology & Philosophy Major: AI can be a useful tool for planning projects and extra studying or clarification. However, I would contend that it is generally prone to causing more harm than good for college education. In areas like psychology and philosophy, critical thinking, reasoning, and effective discussions are crucial for learning and becoming effective in any related field. A student who is doing philosophy for pre-law or psychology for clinical applications or biology for pre-med will not be better off for using AI by the time an LSAT or GRE or MCAT must be taken, nor will they be better off when it comes time to apply their knowledge in a real-world setting. AI can summarize well-known facts and build fairly effective outlines for papers, but it can provide wrong information and be relied on too heavily. When accepted as truth prematurely or used excessively, it harms learning and one’s ability to perform by oneself. More direct uses of AI, such as using it to analyze a patient’s vitals in a hospital, could be very beneficial and allow practitioners to direct their focus elsewhere. That being said, practitioners (and anyone in any career, for that matter) must be effective in and capable of whatever is expected of them beyond AI supplementation. AI may track health information or summarize court cases or patient notes, but it cannot so easily replace the work and knowledge of a human being who is well-equipped in their discipline. The construction of such a work ethic and field knowledge begins in the undergraduate classroom, and AI has the capacity to undermine this process almost entirely.
Kaylee Bravo, Senior, Secondary Education English. In my major it is highly encouraged to use AI as a tool to lesson-plan or to come up with engaging activities that will keep students active. AI is a tool in such cases. However, at the same time it is preventing future teachers from making their own lesson plans or activities that could be more beneficial or engaging for students than what AI created. I do think that in college, AI is more harmful than it is beneficial. College is meant to prepare students for their future career. It is meant to get people ready for the workforce. By using AI for classes, students prevent themselves from learning key skills that they will need to carry with themselves for their future classes, career, or any other endeavors in life. AI is a tool that can and should be taught, but students should practice building their skills before turning to and relying on AI.
Laney Smith, Senior, Chemistry. I am a chemistry major on the pre-med track, and I also tutor maths and sciences. I believe that the use of AI is detrimental for students learning the foundations of biology, physics, and chemistry. As a tutor, I am typically seeing students that do not care much for their class and are not understanding the professor’s instruction on the topic. When they don’t understand how to solve a problem, they ask AI for answers to the questions, and this ultimately results in one of three different outcomes. The first option is that the answer is right (which hardly ever happens in the harder classes). Second is that the answer is right, but the process that AI follows to solve it is wrong, or more difficult than the way taught in class, which ultimately confuses and causes more trouble for the student to learn the process. The last is that the answer is wrong, and the process to get the answer is also wrong, so the student does not learn anything. While tutoring, fixing a student’s thought process is very difficult when they have learned from AI. In my opinion, AI is not useful for learning in any of the courses I have taken here at K-State, and I have seen first-hand how it harms the learning of other students. While I acknowledge that AI is a good way to expand the perspectives of a course, I don’t think it is what students should be learning from to study for exams and quizzes.
Jacob Underwood, Senior, News and Sports Media Major. I believe that AI has no place in education because it lets student effort and thinking to be sidelined for laziness. Students using AI do not consider the long-term ramifications of AI and how it affects their education; they only consider the deadlines they have to meet and the balancing of their responsibilities. I believe that K-State and every other learning institution should do a wholesale ban on the use of generative AI systems. I understand and acknowledge what good AI can do for the world. At this very moment, it is spotting tumors in patients and assisting in all fields of human endeavor. However, it offers nothing to News and Sports Media majors, who would do well to study their own sports statistics and write their own news stories. No good can come from allowing it to persist.
K-State English 