Gone are the days when the AI revolution was considered a threat to human existence. Today’s era highlights how humans and machines can work side-by-side to enhance human performance in every area of life. Studies keep proving its impact on the educational industry time and again.
Still, AI is not all sunshine and rainbows. It has its disadvantages and negative impacts. From the viewpoint of educators, one such impact of AI is directed at students’ academic performance. Are students using AI to foster learning or has this advancement limited their learning process in general? More specifically, how students are using AI to enrich or bypass the demanding tasks of studying and researching?
Here are some ways AI helps students to reach their academic goals followed by the ways it is diminishing the quality of learning in younger generations.
Benefits of Automating Essay Writing
Time-Saving
The most commonly quoted reason for using AI tools for essay writing is that students want to save time. Oftentimes, they have too many assignments to complete. At other times, they have their family or job commitments to attend. These curricular and extra-curricular activities prompt them to look for time-saving solutions.
In such circumstances, you can choose to pay someone to write your essay or you can employ AI tools to do the research, writing, and editing work for you. Both choices have their pros and cons, but the compromise on the quality of the essay that comes with using AI tools is real.
Online Essay Proofreader
Many students use these tools with extreme caution and limit the automated help to only editing their essays. These students would carry out the research themselves, execute the writing phase, and complete the citations to avoid plagiarism.
Once they have carried out the whole process, they will only take help from the AI tools to ensure that their task is up to the mark. In turn, these tools will lend them their artificial eyeballs and detect those issues that were left undetected during the manual editing phase. Expect to see grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and syntax issues with these tools.
Again, these editing suggestions from AI tools should be taken with a grain of salt as they may change the meaning of the whole sentence.
Research Help
It’s not recommended for students to delegate the literature review phase to the AI tools, but they can use these tools to speed up the research process. Once a student has determined a specific information source authentic, he may choose to get a summary of the whole study using advanced summarization tools.
Again, this process is not free of risk as this summarization process may ignore a few facts from the study under review that might help with writing the essay.
Drawbacks of AI Tools
Loss of Critical Thinking
One important criterion of an institute’s academic success is teaching its students to critically analyze the data they encounter. Graduates are expected to think independently and give more or less power to one fact over others to reach their decisions.
So, if I am excessively relying on artificial intelligence tools to write my essays for me, I am not dealing with the information that is being used to deliver the essay. In the end, I would lose my ability to discern the quality and authenticity of a piece of information. Unfortunately, this lack of hands-on approach to researching becomes a norm for students alienating them from developing their critical thinking and reaching decisions knowledgably.
Backward-Looking Approach
By default, AI tools take a backward-looking approach as they only base their research and conclusions on the information previously published. Students cannot, and should not, rely on these tools to suggest developments, recommend solutions, or forecast developments, especially in humanity-related subjects.
This approach limits the scope of work these students can present and any assignment that is based on these tools will lack creativity. In the end, the students will lose touch with their inherent problem-solving skills.
Weaker Arguments
The lifeblood of any essay the facts it uses to present its points. The weight of these facts will determine the quality of an essay. If a student relies solely on AI tools to generate an argument for his essay, he accepts the risk associated with any limitation offered by these tools without mitigation.
These tools can do my essay, but they will pull information from all types of sources irrespective of their authenticity. At the same time, a popular piece of content, even when it’s far from reality, may gain more prominence in an AI-generated essay if it’s validated by more than a few digital sources.
This absence of quality control over the type of information an AI tool picks up can seriously jeopardize the health of the essay being written.
Overreliance on Technology
Information technology has become a prominent part of our lifestyle. It started with communicating promptly with other humans but today, it has influenced every area of our lives from as natural tasks as parenting to as tech-savvy tasks as aeronautics.
Taking help from an app or website that writes essays for you is another task students add to the do-to list of technology making themselves even more dependent on technology than they previously were. What’s more bothersome is that this extra layer of reliance could be easily avoided if students took responsibility for their academic success.
Wrap Up
AI has gained massive popularity in every industry in recent years for good reasons. However, students’ assignment help is an area that is negatively impacted by these advancements. Because it allows students to avoid learning about the topic, educators are concerned that widespread use of these tools will hamper learning in the coming years. This post talks about the merits and demerits of using AI tools to bring ease to the essay writing process.
This inclusion of AI tools is a good measure for students who only want to maintain the quality of their writing and are putting in adequate effort to research and complete the task manually. The only issue is that most students have taken this extra source of help too far and it is deterring their academic performance now.
