Editorial: an educational devolution or a step in a new direction?

AI: An education devolution or a step in a new direction?

Artificial Intelligence (AI), regardless of the industry, seems at the same time fascinating and terrifying; education is no different. AI engines like OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot are, no doubt, a formidable obstacle in the way of academic integrity. The ability for students to enter essay prompts or free-response questions and receive full-fledged answers in a matter of seconds is a dream come true for academic slackers, a nightmare for teachers. Some classes will, no doubt, revert to the days of pen and paper, but for those still tethered to the comforts of tech-based learning, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Let us not forget that just decades ago, teachers were faced with a similar dilemma. The rise of the internet changed many things for the better, even in education, in which many processes became more efficient and streamlined. Nevertheless, the rising tide of information accessible at the click of a mouse allowed aspiring cheaters to forge papers faster and more easily than ever before. Some teachers, of course, continued to make students write by hand to prevent the problem at the source. Others, however, fought fire with fire. Anti-plagiarism software such as Turnitin were launched near the turn of the century; this allowed teachers and professors to cross-reference thousands of websites at once and eliminate the threat of plagiarism, at least from online sources. Such a development is not an anomaly — throughout history, technologial problems have been solved using none other than technology itself. The rise of AI, even in a learning environment, will be no different. You may think that, unlike text copied and pasted from the internet, AI-generated text would be nearly impossible to detect. After all, software like Turnitin simply scans the web for matching bodies of text; if the text was never before written, how can a teacher be sure that the text was not plagiarized through AI engines such as ChatGPT? Ironically enough, the answer may lie in AI. Other AI creations, such as the Content-at-scale’s AI detector, use AI to determine if a passage was created by AI. For example, pasting the entry paragraph of a Wikipedia page into a plagiarism-checking software shows that it is, in fact, 100% plagiarized. Pasting the AI-generated equivalent into the same software shows that it is 100% original. When using the AI detection tool, on the other hand, the AI-generated entry shows up as 0% real while the human-written one shows up as 92% real. Well, what does this all mean? To put it simply, just because AI like ChatGPT have the power to completely write complex passages doesn’t mean that it will disrupt the educational sphere. Teachers can use AI-detection software in tandem with previously used plagiarism detection software to make sure that their students are being academically honest and counter the problem from both sides. AI is a powerful tool, and OpenAI has thrust it into the hands of the masses by releasing it to the public, who may use it for malicious purposes. But just because this tool seems to be a frightening figure looming in the distance does not mean it’s unstoppable. We are not powerless against Artificial Intelligence, though it may seem all-powerful. We just have to know where to look if we want to defend our current state of life. This piece was written by Oliver Fichte on behalf of The Highlander Editorial Board.