Write Me an Essay…
Long gone is the time when we, upon being faced with an empty homework assignment and a tight deadline, regrettably open up our textbook to the chapter in question and study the subject in its entirety in hopes that something would drive us in the right direction to the answer. If an essay is to be written on the customs of ancient Rome, we would find the corresponding reliable sources through a search in Google Scholar or at the bottom of a particularly well-cited Wikipedia article. When faced with a question that our mind utterly refused to think of a novel thing to say, we would walk through our memories and the curiosities we had over the week.
These days, we still find ourselves face-to-face with a blank document and an empty array of questions, yet when stuck on a phrase or something to say, our creativity is outsourced to an LLM. A Language Learning Model has more to say than we do, backed up by the words of millions and an entire internet to scour. It will pay attention to the details about us stored in its memory from all our conversations. Given a request, it never fails to have an answer; if ideas will not come to us organically, we can simply demand they do, and we will receive a pre-filtered collection of ideas based on what an algorithm thinks a human would say.
In that moment, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or any other AI has defined the ideas we have. A lack of ideas, rather than bringing about a perspective born of our stray interests and unique personalities, is fixed with a list of the most predictable responses humanity may ever come up with. A world of possibilities is replaced with a frame that anchors itself in the mind as a new base to work off of. The “harmless” prompt, copied and pasted from our instructions and deliverables that we swore would only serve as a board to bounce our own original ideas from, has robbed us of ideas formed by our own imaginations and has deprived us of an opportunity to practice our creativity.
In a space where creativity is not an ability that comes to mind and hard-and-fast logic gives us a definite answer, the challenge is lost on us, instead replaced with a superficial understanding of the subject. Given a page of math questions, which we must mull over with the techniques we have supposedly seen in class, we would have once referenced our notes for a hint. If we have no clue what we should be doing, we dig through information studied in depth in hopes of something that clicks. We can’t just jump to the passage that would perfectly suit the question; instead, we must put the pieces together until we see a connection.
Something that seems “impossible” to solve is given to an algorithm, which, even if we beg not to give us the answer, will give us just the right hints and concepts we need to know, simplified into a handful of sentences. The breadth of knowledge is now a few pieces that we just need to shuffle into place without really understanding the big picture it connects to. Each question, though we think we have solved through our own merit, just gently aided by artificial intelligence, is a picture of fragmented, simplified knowledge, missing the nuance and critical thinking we were supposed to develop along the way.
Every roadblock cleared by AI separates us from skills and knowledge we were supposed to be one step closer to, stealing that opportunity away without us even realizing it. We make our way higher and higher through classes we were supposed to understand thoroughly but instead got by with a shallow, unearned understanding. Our foundation is weak, but we are forced to keep building on it. New information, new challenges, each harder than the last and requiring a deeper base of information we do not have, bring us back to the over-reliance that prompted it.
With things we should be capable of and a push that is intended to guide us one step further than we were last time, there is an insurmountable wall, missing the ledges we were supposed to hold on to. And in that way, we cannot help it. Our hands are tied, and it’s out of our control. It’s too hard to make up for years of gaps and missing pieces, so when faced with a looming deadline and a scope of expectations we are not prepared for, we come back to the start, a click away from copy-and-pasting the things we should be able to do into an algorithm that will only make things worse. So, in hopes of keeping us grounded, not on shattered thin ice, but on a solid base of our abilities and skills, it may be better to never paste that string of text, and instead, open up the pages of notes, videos, and information we once had to sift through by hand.
Written by Aishwarya Paryani, Design: Izzy Davis, Social Media: Madilenn McPeters