Michael Berry, AI Nightmares: Rise of the Dead Souls:
Gradually, I also realized that the appearance of AI was inverting the relationship of labor when it comes to education. Students were taking all of 15 seconds to type in a prompt and hand in a robot-generated assignment while my TAs and I were carefully reading through them, offering comments and suggestions in good faith. And then, when we suspected foul play, we had to switch gears, put on our “detective” hats and spend even more time trying to find evidence of academic dishonesty.
(…) Once upon a time, I thought the promise of AI might be to improve our lives, to harness new computing power to make us smarter and more efficient. Of course, AI is evolving quicker than any of us can comprehend, but at least as of this moment, it feels like AI is taking us backward. Students cannot resist the temptation of AI. It is too accessible, too easy. More and more of our students are not reading, and they are not writing. Instead, they submit AI-written essays that are often predictable, repetitive, and laden with “hallucinations” and fake sources; and we, as educators, are in turn increasingly relegated to the role of AI police. (…) Students are increasingly unwilling (or unable?) to invest the time needed to read long, complex narratives and compose their own essays that reflect, question, and explore the impact new ideas are having upon them. And as we outsource our thinking to the machines, we inevitably find ourselves all the more impoverished.