A time-honored tradition in schooling at the start of any semester is syllabus week. Around my senior year of high school, I started to notice parts of my syllabi referencing artificial intelligence usage in class. Even more noticeable is when I have begun to notice teachers noting that they used AI to assist with their assignments.
For example, I recently was doing a very personal assignment for class. The assignment was a paper meant to draw from life experiences. Attached to the assignment was a note that stated that the assignment summary was generated by AI. In this paper, we were meant to write to reflect something extremely personal that would be graded on a rubric an AI helped generate.
Now, I want to be clear, Drake University has an Artificial Intelligence major, and throughout this article, I will be referring to hypocrisy within how school authorities engage with AI. This will only apply to actual hypocrisy and will not be used to shame those within the University who engage with AI critically as part of their major.
Rather, I want to talk about things like seeing that various courses in subjects unassociated with AI include assignments with notes indicating that the assignment used AI to generate it, or having random class periods to engage with AI. I feel like this is time wasted.
AI, even as a tool, is not something I think a good chunk of classes need to practice. I have had several classes where the teacher will just tell us to whip out a generative AI model and do random tasks associated with the class with it. Why is this how we are spending class time that we labored to be here for on a tool that may be just an economic bubble?
So what’s the point of practicing a tool that we as students aren’t allowed to use, all while witnessing people in their careers using it?
The defense for this is that AI is a substitute for other tools. I can stand by that from an education standpoint. To some level, teaching students how to be aware of these tools while not allowing them to use them in their own work is fair.
It’s a way of encouraging natural growth that makes sense. So, if AI is only to be used as a tool to not replace real effort, then why do we have faculty purchasing posters generated by AI or using it to generate assignments?
Now, the argument can and has been made that faculty are using these tools as experienced professionals, and that is valid. However, a study done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concludes that no matter who is using AI, they are coming to rely more and more on it.
“This convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users’ inclination to critically evaluate the LLM’s output or ‘opinions’ (probabilistic answers based on the training datasets),” the study reported.
By cognitively offloading that work, these faculty are choosing the path of least resistance to provide for the students.
AI has no place in an academic setting (unless AI itself is related to the study) purely because it is an offload of cognitive function. You are no longer doing the thinking or putting in effort — the AI is. We, as a university, need to understand and set hard lines about how acceptable AI is and stick to them in each major.
I do not mean to sound accusatory, as we are in an age in which we are struggling with this new tool, but I would implore faculty to remember that we, the students, have paid and worked a lot to be here.
By choosing the easiest option that is actively something the majority of students are told not to choose, the message becomes that the warning against AI is arbitrary. We become desensitized to using it because we see it everywhere.
In conclusion, I think there needs to be a consensus about AI being used as a tool in our university. Either there needs to be actual effort put in across the board and a commitment to using AI only as a tool, or it needs to be acknowledged that all at the University will use AI as has been demonstrated.
For me, the answer is clear — faculty need to really analyze their use of this tool and put more effort into not using it.
