Remind yourself that, in the long term, they are cheating themselves. Shifting the burden of thinking to AI means that these students will be unlikely to learn to think about these problems for themselves. Learning is a skill, problem solving is a skill, hell, thinking is a skill. If you don’t practice a skill, you don’t improve, full stop.
When/if these students graduate, if their most practiced skill is prompting an AI then I’d say they’re putting a hard ceiling on their future potential. How are they going to differentiate themselves from all the other job seekers? Prompting an AI is stupid easy, practically anyone can do that. Where is their added value gonna come from? What happens if they don’t have access to AI? Do they think AI is always going to be cheap/free? Do they think these companies are burning mountains of cash to give away the service forever?? When enshittification inevitably comes for the AI platforms, there will be entire cohorts filled with panic and regret.
My advice would be to keep taking the road less traveled. Yes it’s harder, yes it’s more frustrating, but ultimately I believe you’ll be rewarded for it.
My partner wrote EVERYTHING with ChatGPT. I kept having the same discussion with him over and over: Write the damn thing yourself. Don’t trust ChatGPT. In the end, we’ll need citations anyway, so it’s faster to write it yourself and insert the citation than to retroactively figure them out for a chapter ChatGPT wrote. He didn’t listen to me, had barely any citation in his part. I wrote my part myself. I got a good grade, he said he got one, too.
Don’t worry about it! The point of education is not grades, it’s skills and personal development. I have a 25 year career in IT, you know what my university grades mean now? Literally nothing! You know what the thinking skills I acquired mean now? Absolutely everything.
Remind yourself that, in the long term, they are cheating themselves. Shifting the burden of thinking to AI means that these students will be unlikely to learn to think about these problems for themselves. Learning is a skill, problem solving is a skill, hell, thinking is a skill. If you don’t practice a skill, you don’t improve, full stop.
When/if these students graduate, if their most practiced skill is prompting an AI then I’d say they’re putting a hard ceiling on their future potential. How are they going to differentiate themselves from all the other job seekers? Prompting an AI is stupid easy, practically anyone can do that. Where is their added value gonna come from? What happens if they don’t have access to AI? Do they think AI is always going to be cheap/free? Do they think these companies are burning mountains of cash to give away the service forever?? When enshittification inevitably comes for the AI platforms, there will be entire cohorts filled with panic and regret.
My advice would be to keep taking the road less traveled. Yes it’s harder, yes it’s more frustrating, but ultimately I believe you’ll be rewarded for it.
Don’t worry about it! The point of education is not grades, it’s skills and personal development. I have a 25 year career in IT, you know what my university grades mean now? Literally nothing! You know what the thinking skills I acquired mean now? Absolutely everything.