The Golden Trident

By Morgan Cranford 

I fear we’re all guilty of it. You’re stuck on a problem that’s maybe too hard, or maybe it’s just too boring, so you open a new tab and type the seven letters feared most by teachers and administrators alike: ChatGPT. And all too quickly and easily, you have your answer; the only work you had to do was copy and paste it into a search bar. It takes at minimum three clicks to have whatever piece of information you could ever desire. There is no guarantee that the information is accurate, but it is right at your fingertips nonetheless. 

By now, most students have figured out ways to use AI to do their work without setting off any alarm bells with teachers. We’re all aware that our teachers can just as easily use AI as we can, checking our work for artificial influence without even having to read it (the irony of this is apparently lost on them). All it takes for a copy and paste to be caught is for a reader to scan the work through an AI detector, many of which are built into the platforms we are submitting our assignments through. But even if they aren’t, a quick Google search for “AI Checker” will yield hundreds of results in milliseconds. 

Since AI became mainstream in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, it has wormed its way into our lives, and many students are now unable to remember how they ever completed their assignments without its help. Because the bottom line is, AI makes finishing school work infinitely easier.                

But the desire to use AI typically doesn’t come from a lack of understanding of the student. Primarily, students will use ChatGPT on their work because they are too lazy to do it themselves, and the option not to is just sitting right there in the next tab over. 

It’s almost painful how easy it has become to cheat. Look over when you’re sitting in class, and chances are, one of the people on either side of you is opting for ChatGPT to do their work. Catching a peer cheating is as easy as getting up to go to the bathroom, seeing at least one screen in the class, and unsubtly sporting the dark background and white text. Because high school students just don’t care. 

Yes, they will skillfully avoid getting caught cheating, but they never stop to consider why they are cheating in the first place. There is no deliberation on the consequences of never doing their work. When the test comes, there is no concern because they can just use AI. When it comes time to apply for college, there is no harm in using ChatGPT to write the essay, right? At every new chapter of life, AI will be there by your side to make sure you never have to have an original thought again. 

This is obviously incredibly bad. It is definitely fair to say that high school assignments could probably use some updating so that students are not bored out of their minds trying to complete pointless assignments day after day. 

But part of that boredom is necessary. It teaches us to work through problems we have no personal interest in, using parts of our brain that can start to feel foreign to us. As most high school students will tell you, the busy work needs to come to an end. Teachers have to construct assignments that have meaning and teach something, rather than forcing students to complete monotonous tasks designed to take up time. 

Using ChatGPT for school assignments is never going to have a good outcome. At best, a student never gets caught and they live their lives using AI as a crutch in every facet of their lives. At worst, AI cripples people’s ability to think, disallowing them from doing anything meaningful in their robotic, unoriginal lives.