The talk of the town at the minute is AI. AI is going to take our jobs. AI is going to take over journalism. AI is going to take over intelligence. The prospect that it could dramatically change our lives is difficult to fully conceptualise. But the reality of AI dependence is far worse than what is commonly believed.
We’ve all been there. That essay about a topic we can’t grasp, ChatGPT can give me a good summary. Sitting in a tutorial and you’re about to be asked the answer to a question you don’t know, Copilot can tell me. As university students, the allure of AI is impossible to ignore. But we all know the consequences of it when we cave in. The offset of personal creativity, thinking, and reasoning is detrimental to our own personal development, but to understand the larger impact we must reshape how we think of AI.
Generative AI is not freethinking, it can’t create its own conclusions: it depends on human input. Generative AI (such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Deepseek, etc) by definition regurgitates human made information. This is your essays, your research, and your articles all being collected and interpreted to produce the outcome you get to your queries. In this sense, AI resembles an eco-system. Humans are food, AI consumes our intelligence.
MIT recently found that students who used AI while writing essays and assignments had less brain neural connectivity: in other words the brain was literally disengaging. The student ‘brain-drain’ is causing less freethinking and less learning. In a recent study, Graphite found that for the first time in history, the number of AI written articles has surpassed the number of human written articles online. These studies are worrisome in isolation, but together they look even more concerning.
The collective human knowledge pool is shrinking as we offload our thinking to machines. The amount of content written online is becoming drastically diluted with AI writing. If the knowledge of AI is from the data it gathers online, then this data will increasingly become more and more infiltrated with AI data. If this trend is to continue, then the information AI is collecting will be less and less credible human written information, and more AI generated content.
Have you ever put a photo through the same filter a few times in a row? You may have seen it done on TikTok, or done it yourself. But every time you pass the photo through the filter it becomes more and more distorted. Suddenly it no longer represents what you started with.
This is the danger we face. Once AI starts to fill its database with AI written content, the output it produces will slowly turn to mush. It will be devoid of creativity and informative content. Soon even AI’s knowledge will start to degrade, and by that time humans will have offloaded so much of their thinking to these machines that there could be no recovery. Slowly, knowledge could be lost and human progress halted.
Universities are the main hub for human thinking, especially when it comes to generating ideas that shape the world. Therefore, they must also be at the frontier of the war with AI. As students begin to offload their thinking to AI, universities stop doing the job they were made to do. If students write an essay made by AI, professors use AI to mark them and to generate feedback, then there is no learning occurring whatsoever and no one is the wiser. This may seem a tad unrealistic, but there is a very real possibility that we can slip into this process of automation. The reality is that this process will happen without realisation.
A common misconception is that humans vs AI is a zero sum game, it’s not. If universities allow for us to fall into this trap, then we risk allowing AI to be our primary information source. But remember, our ChatGPTs’ and Geminis’ main information source is us. The ecosystem is then broken. Neither can survive. AI needs us as much as we need AI.
Therefore, the question is simple, the path is clear. Universities must do their best to ban AI use. They can give no ground to AI to infiltrate the institutions. But what if the time for the debate has passed and we are no longer able to control it?
Professor Martin Mills, Chair for Anthropology at Aberdeen University, in conversation with The Gaudie said that “it is not a question of now,” whether universities can give up any ground to AI. This was a question of the past. They already have. It would be almost impossible to completely banish AI when it has already infiltrated our way of academic process. It is unrealistic to try and reverse this.
The real issue that universities face is that there is not a clear way to address this issue. If we can’t reverse it, then what can we do? But additionally, universities are increasingly looking to adopt AI in certain areas to streamline processes and to cut costs. As Professor Mills put it, “it’s the human response that is problematic.
It may seem dire, and it may seem pessimistic, but the real issue is that we have no clue what the next few years could look like. Professors and academics alike are concerned, and there doesn’t seem like there is a clear cut way forward.
So I suppose sit down and get strapped in, the next few years are going to be bumpy. But remember one thing, that the student is the main cog in this machine. And if you are concerned about the ‘brain-drain,’ don’t let yourself be swept up in it. Have some integrity – don’t use AI.
