Student Blog: A Scourge Upon Us

As luck would have it, the idea I had for a free-choice piece this month coincided with our prompted topic. I hate generative AI. I will shout it from the mountaintops, I will shout it from my apartment window, I will shout it into your ear right now. With zero reservations, I think less of people who use sites like ChatGPT to accomplish tasks for them, especially in academic environments. To me, it is utterly shameful and morally disqualifying. 

I often think about two instances to back up this mantra. One took place in May 2024 when I was taking a class about bringing acting techniques into the concept of leadership. This course is designed around individual reflection and taking initiative to become a more effective communicator and coordinator. Such a theme is one I could easily deduce, but this was not clear to everyone involved. During a quiz, I couldn’t help but notice the person sitting in front of me copying the questions from the browser, pasting them into ChatGPT, and putting the fully formed fake answers into the text boxes. This person was naturally the first to finish and left class early, but I was left in disbelief. What would possess someone to approach a quiz about your own opinions on leadership where there are virtually no wrong answers, and allow a computer to decide what you think for you?

The second happened in December. I took a super interesting writing class that focused on the study of games as text. Naturally, the final exam was a group project where we set out to make our own board game. My group-mates and I poured in a lot of work over the course of five weeks to make it come to life, and we created something we all not only were proud of, but enjoyed playing. On the final presentation day, another group showed off the custom cards they made for their game, featuring cool designs that caught the class’s collective eye. Someone asked at the end, “who made the artwork for the cards?” and one of the presenters replied “me, well uhh, sort of me. I wrote the AI prompts for it.” My opinion of the project, as well as its creators, instantly tanked. The person openly cheated like that, and the entire group was okay with handing in their final knowing it was made partially by a computer. I think that’s a little gross. 

Over winter break, I met one of my former high school English teachers for coffee. He lamented the sheer number of hoops that he now has to jump through to make sure a human student actually wrote the thing that they purported to have written. It’s become impossible to assign books; time devoted to the writing process is at an all-time low; and his passion for teaching has dwindled significantly. While it was nice to catch up, it really sucked to hear how common this brand of cheating has become. 

Looking at the big picture, I don’t know how people can be so complacent about the rampant infection that is generative AI.  Aside from the absurd quantity of water required for upkeep at the data centers causing an acceleration in anthropogenic climate change, it represents a frightening relinquishing of effort on the individual’s part. I guess nobody learned anything from the ship passengers in WALL-E. Choosing the path of least resistance doesn’t make sense when it comes to things like this. What is the point of education if not to be challenged? What merit does a degree carry if the recipient actively circumvented the work that getting a degree is supposed to entail? Forcing yourself to think critically is part of what higher education is about. 

Having the perspective from being in an artistic field makes this exceptionally clear. AI’s rise has opened the floodgates for countless people online to call themselves “artists” for typing words into a box and posting the image it synthesizes onto Twitter as if it was their own creation. It is incomprehensible to me how entitled these people feel to the finished product when they have invested none of the time and effort that it should require. I have no sympathy for those using AI for art or music because they found it too hard on their own. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to demand discipline, failure, and perseverance from you. Nothing worth having— in life, but especially in the pursuit of art— is easy. 

I had a lot of work piled up for me at the end of fall quarter. Between my physical health continuing to decline and being part of Vinegar Tom, a lot got in the way of due dates. At one point, my professor kindly offered me the option to take an incomplete mark and finish in January. But I put my head down and stuck it out. At 3:30 in the morning on December 15th, I turned in two completed final papers, slammed my laptop shut, and declared the quarter to be over. Were those papers my all-time best work? No. Do I endorse staying up that late to get a paper done? Not even a little bit. But it’ll be a cold day in hell before I let ChatGPT think for me. 

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