Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a significant part of history since the 1950s, and since then, we’ve seen it develop more and more. These past couple of years, however, we’ve seen it become more prominent than it was before. With the way AI is set up now, it can play a big role in day-to-day life, depending on how a person uses it.
Whether that be from homework help, to humor, to finding clothes, AI is there almost every step of the way. However, with how much it’s been developing, there are bound to be a lot of questions. What does this do for the public? Does it do more harm than good? What good or harm could it even do? Well, you’ll come to find it’s less black and white than you’d expect.
Despite what most people think, AI is and can be a tremendous help in school when utilized correctly. It could help students study by teaching them according to their pace and learning style.
Not only that, but it could be a great help for children with disabilities or students who need help translating a language. Additionally, it’s great to help teachers grade things like quizzes or tests.
However, a big issue with AI, especially in schools, is overreliance. Kids use AI to complete assignments, essays, or even tests, resulting in a large portion of them not fully learning or grasping the material. Overreliance could cause problems in the future, as we might see test scores lower because of students not truly knowing the material, and instead using AI to cheat. Schools need to teach students how to use AI responsibly, so they don’t end up becoming overreliant on AI and use it for everything. If kids end up becoming overreliant on AI, it could ruin their lives as they’d lack basic education and skills necessary to function in life.
Speaking of overreliance, people are using AI as a substitute for things such as therapy, which most AI resources like ChatGPT aren’t made for. Instead, it gives advice that is more often than not worse than a psychologist or even a friend could give. A large majority of people also ask AIs like ChatGPT questions that can be easily searched on Google. This is a significant issue because AI uses resources such as electricity and water, and emits substantial amounts of greenhouse gases, making it a much more harmful alternative than browsers like Bing or Google.
However, when used correctly, AI could be an extremely helpful tool, in some cases even better than Bing or Google. With these search engines, you’d need to find what you’re looking for through a link or a separate page; however, with an AI like ChatGPT, you could get the answer directly. In addition to that, the answers you get are conversational and human-like, instead of automated and overtly robotic. It’s these same qualities that, unfortunately, make people abuse AI. So, as long as it’s being used responsibly, asking a question here and there is harmless.
The biggest issue with AI, though, is the new “Sora 2,” which was recently released. You put in a prompt, and it makes hyper realistic videos of whatever the prompt is. So realistic, that in most cases people can’t tell the difference. Yes, while it’s fun to use it to recreate anime fight scenes, it could grow into a larger issue because, with how realistic the software is, a lot of the time, people can’t tell the AI-generated animation from animation from actual shows, which could lead to animators’ jobs being taken from them, as AI could just recreate it instead.
Another thing is that Sora can generate anything, which is bad because the prompts are so realistic that people can’t tell the difference between AI and real life, which could be used to scam people for personal information or, even worse, frame people for crimes.
Overall, AI use isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but it needs to get regulations or restrictions very soon, because if not, then AI may end up taking a turn for the worse.