AI Is a Language Microwave
Nearly two years ago, I wrote that AI would kill the undergraduate essay. That reaction came in the immediate aftermath of ChatGPT, when the sudden appearance of its shocking capabilities seemed to present endless vistas of possibility—some liberating, some catastrophic.
Since then, the potential of generative AI has felt clear, although its practical applications in everyday life have remained somewhat nebulous. Academia remains at the forefront of this question: Everybody knows students are using AI. But how? Why? And to what effect? The answer to those questions will, at least to some extent, reveal the place that AI will find for itself in society at large.
There have been several rough approaches to investigate student use of ChatGPT, but they have been partial: polls, online surveys, and so on. There are inherent methodological limits to any study of students using ChatGPT: The technology is so flexible and subject to different cultural contexts that drawing any broadly applicable conclusions about it is challenging. But this past June, a group of Bangladeshi researchers published a paper exploring why students use ChatGPT, and it’s at least explicit about its limitations—and broader in its implications about the nature of AI usage in the world.
Of the many factors that the paper says drive students to use ChatGPT, three are especially compelling to me. Students use AI because it saves time; because ChatGPT produces content that is, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from the content they might produce themselves; and because of what the researchers call the “Cognitive Miserliness of the User.” (This is my new favorite phrase: It refers to people who just don’t want to take the time to think. I know many.)
