Eyes Wide Open

In 2020, a girl named Katie was called to a Zoom meeting with her high school principal in a small town in Massachusetts. She happily joined, not knowing she was entering a conduct meeting. The school software had detected the use of Grammarly on her last English paper. What the principal failed to see was that the only correction Katie made with Grammarly was to change the placement of a comma in one sentence. This led to a deduction in Katie’s grade for that class since detention wasn’t plausible amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In April 2024, Katie, now a junior in college, submitted her final research paper, which had taken the entire semester to write. But Katie didn’t actually write it. She developed the main points and ideas, selected the most relevant quotes, and wrote her thoughts on each article she found. Then she entered those thoughts into ChatGPT with the prompt, “Make this a cohesive paper with in-text citations.” She submitted an outstanding, polished, and (obviously) cohesive research paper. And she received an A.

You may be thinking, “That’s cheating,” but she followed all the AI guidelines in the class syllabus. The only rule regarding ChatGPT or other AI tools was that the concepts and ideas needed to be the student’s own. That’s it.

It’s hard to say whether Katie’s work was ethical. What I do know is that this semester-long project was carelessly completed in one lazy night when Katie didn’t want to do her work. I asked Katie what the paper was about, and she wasn’t able to tell me much. AI can be an asset to our technology, but we need to learn when and how to regulate our use before it takes over our work. If Katie had been doing that research project 20 years ago, she could have discussed her topic endlessly. She would have known it inside and out, better than most. But even though she conducted all the research and devised her arguments, she didn’t have to sit with the information and make profound connections that led to revelations about the topic. The cultivation of the project is the most important part for the artist. I believe this applies to every project in life. Any project is art, and AI strips the art of its creativity.

AI is genius and innovative, astounding and exciting, and honestly, downright fascinating. But it ruins the humanity of the work. It’s like a toxic partner, stripping someone of their personality. Its red flags are flying high, and we need to set some serious boundaries.