At the start of the year, I volunteered for the Panther Crew to direct incoming freshmen to their classes. A week before the first day, we had a meet and greet with our facilitator and did general ice breakers to get to know one another.
I was talking with another student when we were asked to write a couple sentences about what sums up our personality.
The student that I was talking to proceeded to try and pull up ChatGPT to write something for him.
Moments like these occur far too often where people over-rely on AI. He was about to ask an artificial system to write his personality for him.
The usage of AI in the art world is also becoming a problem.
Over the summer I was part of a Tallgrass Filmfestival youth program and part of our job was to review 15 hours worth of student submitted short films. Multiple films I reviewed clearly used AI generated visuals.
From asking ChatGPT to write an essay to having AI dictate how we behave, AI has taken over our lives in ways that negatively affect our future as well as our humanity.
Some people have even gone as far as thinking that they are “dating” ChatGPT. We must also be mindful of what we type into these systems, seeing as how OpenAI has admitted that these conversations you have with their system are not private and can be viewed by the company or hackers who want to access people’s personal records.
With the rise of ChatGPT, Gemini and many other systems, things can go downhill fast for the lives of students. We can not rely on these artificial mainframes to do all of the work that we will be doing in adulthood.
The entire goal of advancing technology is to make humans smarter and more efficient. When you remove the human element entirely, things will become much more efficient. But we also have to take into account that our lives in whatever field we enter is in danger. Whether you would like to become an artist or a businessman, the growth of artificial intelligence will threaten to remove you from your place of work.
Studies have shown that AI will either automate or completely transform 50% to 60% of all jobs by the year 2040. This will cause an unprecedented amount of layoffs and widespread joblessness.
This may not seem like a problem to us while we’re still in high school, but this is a problem our generation will be inheriting, and it is our responsibility to fix this mess.