UR | Will Artificial Intelligence lead us to Real Ignorance?

UR | Will Artificial Intelligence lead us to Real Ignorance?

Using AI for study assignments is tempting, but shouldn’t students protect themselves from its pitfalls? And what role does TU/e have to play in this? University Council member Oded Raz wonders about this, painfully aware of how AI has affected his own writing and programming skills.

By now, we have all surrendered some of our cognitive activities to an AI. For those of us who were (un)fortunate enough to live in the pre-AI era, we are aware, sometimes even painfully aware, of how our spelling or grammar has gotten worse or how our coding skills have diminished.

However, we still believe that we are making a calculated choice. We allow the AI to take over tasks so we can do other things. But what about our students? When they relinquish the tasks of writing assignments or coding, what are they losing in the process, and who should ensure that we do not undermine their learning, creating something we could call Real Ignorance (RI)?

I have been teaching a 1st-year master’s course at the Electrical Engineering department for almost ten years now. The course is a general introduction to academic research and, as such, has always been assessed by asking students to submit short (~400 words) essays.

For many years, my biggest struggle was reading through badly constructed arguments and poor grammar. However, in the past couple of years, my concern has shifted. It is clear to me that more and more students choose to use large language models or LLMs for writing the course assignments.

You may ask yourself, is that a problem? Engineers in the industry will not be required to write essays supporting their claims. They will also most likely be offered access to similar LLMs in their future jobs and hence could avoid the need to put their thoughts into writing on their own.

But in the process of shifting the responsibility of producing essays to the AI, students are losing a learning opportunity and are failing to develop a skill. And even if writing of an essay will not be a skill required for any future work, using your brains to develop complicated logical argumentations may be, right?

It is also important to mention that not all students embrace LLMs and other AI tools to take over their cognitive tasks and help them with course work. There is a significant part of the student population that resists the temptation and works diligently to acquire the skills the previous generation had to acquire.

And while they do reap the benefits of developing these skills, they are often frustrated by the fact that their fellow classmates, who do turn to AI to ease their workload, get similar or even higher grades. They may then ask themselves: why do bad things happen to good people?

When I present the assignments to the students at the beginning of the course, I tell them they are not allowed to use LLMs to write them. I also tell them I will not check if they did. I try to motivate them to take the opportunity to develop their own intelligence, because every time they opt for the LLM option, they are increasing not only the AI but also the RI.

Instead of teachers trying endlessly to play cat and mouse with students, isn’t it time for students to take a position on this as a group? Isn’t it in the students’ best interests to develop themselves instead of supporting the growth of AI at the expense of creating RI? And what is the actual role of the university in guiding our students through this upheaval?

Oded Raz is Professor of Photonics at TU/e and represents the staff faction PUC in the University Council. The views expressed in this column are his own.