In the past few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly popular within technology, especially for college students. ChatGPT specifically, has become more relevant within the workplace environment, as well as within the academic environment. But how important is efficiency when it hinders creativity? I believe that it has taken a significant toll on students’ creativity as well as their ability to problem solve and work on basic everyday skills.
Particularly within the computer science field, students now can simply ask AI to write the code in any language given a prompt. While many students may scramble to finish assignments and see this as an easy way out, they don’t realize the toll it may be taking on their problem-solving skills, and their ability to figure out these complex problems by themselves. This also raises the question: If AI can do all these tasks for us within a few seconds where it might take students days to figure out, why take the time to learn all this when we have technology to do it for us?
Artificial intelligence also hinders a student’s ability to be creative and generally, the front end of innovation. Say you were given an assignment where you had to create a product that enhances a gap in the market… artificial intelligence can now create this for you too. Even when it comes to creative writing, ChatGPT can curate a whole essay for you in just seconds with a given prompt. This can potentially impair students’ ability from a grammatical and vocabulary level. When a student can simply just curate an essay from a machine, it saves them a lot of time in which they don’t get the opportunity to problem solve and demonstrate their level of intelligence.
Nowadays, AI can also generate artistic images when given a prompt, which may take away value from the years of effort, time, and individuality artists put into their work. There have also been many ethical problems as AI uses the vision of other artists and compiles them into one to create an image, which goes against copyright violations. From the start, artists have poured their emotions into their art, and unfortunately, artificial intelligence is incapable of understanding human emotion, which once again raises a new question: What is art if it is not purposeful? Can AI once again obstruct another profession?
Overall, the wildly popular use of AI has stricken many concerns and devalues the creativity and intelligence of many people. Although artificial intelligence drives down the time it takes to complete tasks and diminishes human error, we must consider how it may be impairing our everyday skills. How important is it to be efficient, when it may be taking a toll on our everyday skills?