AI: Great... or not so great?

AI is something old now. 

Well, not old, but something you've been hearing about for so long that you're probably already fed up of it.

It's a huge topic, as all things with the potential to dominate humanity do, which has been plaguing social media and the internet for several years now. Surely you know the names - ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and more recently many others too. There's even a network online for AIs to interact with each other...

Artificial intelligence serves so many purposes - to give facts, check facts, generate images, write stories, edit images, write recipes, give advice, provide a source of comfort - you name it, if you don't have a human to do it for you, AI can. In many cases, this can mean doing homework or helping in the common workplace. 

After all, once you teach something, it learns it. Learning leads to knowledge leads to new capabilities and power; people have recently been wondering just how much power we really should be giving to our machine friends. As complicated as they are, they really can be useful at times, as long as you ignore the waffle and the other unnecessary babble that AIs generate along with an answer (Open AI and Google, take note!). 

However, AI can still get things wrong. At the end of the day, it still learns by making countless mistakes and even ChatGPT once used to think that there were 2 "r"s in the word "strawberry" (if you can't count, there are three). When it does get things wrong, it can be very annoying and suggests that it will never be capable of being completely accurate and able to serve humanity reliably. 

What if that was just a distraction, however, from the many areas where AI is so advanced that it is more efficient and factually accurate than all of humanity? Well, it was bound to happen after giving an LLM many thousands of hours to learn nearly everything we've ever known.

BUT today, we're going to focus on one thing in particular - the inescapable effects of AI on students and students' learning. 

You have probably heard of students cheating in tests with artificial intelligence to help them answer every question correctly - where obviously the students benefit nothing and - well - I guess nobody benefits anything. This is very easy to understand; why wouldn't you want to be able to just achieve the top marks on any test without having to try? However, you don't need much deeper thought to realise that there is no point in doing so - it is a waste of time and nothing is learned from making no mistakes.

Is this the consequence of a harsh teaching system where pupils fear making mistakes?

Or is it just a laziness virus, spreading because of a solution too difficult to resist?

The same could be said about homework (ahem, Sparx Maths). Many students end up just using AI because they simply can not be bothered to complete questions that they don't understand and don't want to put effort in to answer. This renders the homework completely useless because the whole point is to practise a certain skill or aspect of the subject. Using AI gives you nothing, unless you learn from the working out that it explains. Most people won't do that and just input the answer for the sake of saving time. Saving time for what? Leisure. This could mean reading, playing computer games, playing sport or just chilling but nonetheless, it is a lack of willpower to spend time on a device doing homework that they learned absolutely nothing from.

It is hard to keep students away from AI because many modern-day devices require softwares that utilise AI as part of their systems and with search platforms such as Google and Microsoft Edge being so universally accessible, it is nearly impossible to avoid.

Additionally, AI is becoming better at speaking and writing like a human. For assignments, this can lead to complete dedication to an AI engine, which in some cases can go unacknowledged. Needless to say, not another good thing for humans.

After all, our artificial intelligences are only as smart as the people using them...

Or is AI better than we think?

Written by Creator J 

27/03/2026