Unveiling the Impact of AI on Education: James' Story

Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Ethics – The City Voice

The city is quiet at night, the only sound being a faint rumble emanating from the bus’ engine, though even that is drowned out by the music blasting from James’ headphones. Looking out the window, the city’s sights slowly drift in and out of view. Suddenly, the bus stops and James looks up, his cheek red from resting on his palm. This is his stop. He stands up, his backpack tossed over one shoulder and his basketball wedged under the other. He lazily shuffles down the aisle, still sore from tonight’s game. Stepping off the bus, James inhales the crisp evening air, soon cut by the exhalation of the bus that drifts over the horizon.

He returns home a quarter after nine and throws together a quick meal for himself. His mother is working a late shift at the hospital tonight, and his father is on a work trip in Phoenix. Walking to his room, he sighs wearily. His history teacher assigned a paper about the Industrial Revolution due tomorrow, but James wasn’t able to work on it all day. Additionally, he had already been learning about the topic for a week now, which was ample time to understand the subject matter.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Education

So James opens up his laptop and types chatgpt.com into his search bar and starts a new chat with the AI. He thinks for a moment before typing ‘Write me a 300-word essay about the industrial revolution’ and hitting enter. The chatbot thinks for a moment before vomiting out an essay that James skims over, before deciding is satisfactory. He pastes the text into a document and uploads it, satisfied that he didn’t have to stay up all night. Plus, who’d care if he used AI for a short paper?

The Concerns of Artificial Intelligence Implementation

This story about James is fabricated, but the situation is real. The students of yesteryear plagiarized Wikipedia or a more obscure website that teachers surely wouldn’t look into, maybe even putting the work in to Frankenstein a plagiarized paper together from various sources that are bursting at the seams with mismatched writing styles and opinions. But now, ChatGPT will do all of that but better (or so it seems) – the writing is cohesive, the tone is the same, and all for less time and effort! However, there are many issues AI struggles with that aren’t being solved. This carelessness hurts the consumers of AI, including the students, workers, and experimenters who are genuinely interested in utilizing the technology in beneficial ways.

The Ethical Dilemma of Artificial Intelligence

I, by no means, am here to argue that the concept of AI is bad; rather, I’m here to discuss how the implementation of these technologies has proven messy and a net negative for our society. This may all change soon, but, for the time being, models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o (and o1) and Google’s Gemini are all given to the public unfinished and riddled with problems all for the same reason: greed. In his book Taming Silicon Valley, author Gary Marcus talks about his personal experience with artificial intelligence and how tech giants realized the potential profits that releasing AI models as soon as possible provides.

“Greed has been a big factor, and the technology we have right now is premature, oversold, and problematic; it’s not the best possible AI we could envision, and yet it’s been raced out the door. Developed carelessly, AI could easily lead to disaster” he writes. Marcus is an expert on artificial intelligence who founded multiple successful AI start-ups and even testified to the Supreme Court on AI safety, saying “I come as a scientist, as someone who has founded AI companies, and as someone who genuinely loves AI – but who is increasingly worried.”

And he should be worried, as should everyone. Profit is causing developers of artificial intelligence to lose sight of what AI is really about and instead worry about being able to drive their stock prices up. And an even bigger problem – it’s working. After markets closed on December 5th, 2023, Google’s parent company Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) was valued at 132.39 USD per share. The next day, Google’s DeepMind development team unveiled Gemini, a “chance to make AI helpful for everyone, everywhere in the world,” according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. But the real help was from investors, who continued to propel the company to an all-time peak of 192.66 USD per share the following July. Even now, on October 17th, 2024, shares are trading for a modest 162.51 USD, falling partly due to their court ruling as a monopoly, but also due to other market-related factors. Below, you can see the substantial 45% price increase in Alphabet Inc’s stock price.

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