A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

In the novel Tom Brown's School Days [0], published in mid 19-th century and depicting a public school in the first quarter of that century, there is a scene describing how students those days used "vulgus-books": collections of previous years' students' homeworks in Latin that new students copied from for their assignments in Latin composition. There was a boy named Arthur in that story who refused to copy from other students' essays, and worked on the compositions himself. He also tried to convince his friends to abandon that practice of copying, and to write their assignments on their own.

This is what this article reminded me of. The student writes how her classmates use help from AI as if she cannot decide for herself to do the work on her own if she cares about learning. She writes as if she is devoid of agency.

The Atlantic published a post on reddit about this article, titled "I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education." [1] And yet, it is the other students that the author primarily focuses on. Why does other students' cheating demolish _her_ education?

[0] - https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1480/pg1480.txt

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1n7o...

That's an interesting point, but one way I can think is that as AI generated homework is completed by AI, "all natural" student performance may seem abysmal in comparison. The students who use AI to do the "grunt work" like paper writing will have more time to do things like attend office hours, befriend professors, network, get internships, or whatever other useful things they can do with their time.

It makes me think of the rampant cheating culture in the PRC. Cheating generally isn't considered immoral, or, it may be, but the attitude is basically "well everyone cheats, so you better do it too or you'll be left behind." University becomes a performance, and all thoughts are turned towards how to present the best in that performance. If you ask someone that buys into this system about the value of, idk, writing a paper so as to learn the material, they'll be very confused. What's the point of learning the material? The only thing that matters is getting the best grade possible. Then you can get the highest paying job possible. That's all that matters.

This is of course not universal, the PRC is a country with a gajillion people in it, but this is what I experienced at university there and when I returned to the USA and was the defacto "PRC student tutor" at my university because of my Mandarin and time spent there. I must have been offered money to write essays for people over fifty times.

So, I can imagine this happening with AI. What does it matter if you learn the material? You use AI to get a good score and then you use AI to do your job anyway so who cares. AI written emails summarized by AI, replies written by AIs, reports generated by AI, sent, summarized by another AI...

If you don't have anyone around who understands the material differently from the way you do, you can't discuss it with them.

This is not particularly worrisome in basic arithmetic, but severely limits history, philosophy, and arts.