CGTC FAQs: Academic Support

As an English instructor, I have seen first-hand the damage that AI misuse is doing to students' ability to think. 

High school and college students' overdependency on AI as a primary writing tool is promoting a culture that values an immediate and automatic answer at the expense of the trial-and-error process of writing (brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading). 

Too often, I have seen students who are afraid to communicate with one another face to face, afraid to read a passage aloud, afraid to work in groups with other students, and afraid to deliver an oral presentation. The fear of communicating without help from ChatGPT is very real in our AI-driven society. 

In the classroom, I ask students questions that don't demand complicated answers--just a little bit of time and thought--but rather than use their individual critical thinking skills, students will often turn to their smartphones and ChatGPT for an answer that they somehow believe is better than any answer that they could generate on their own. 

George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, saw this coming a long time ago. What we have now in every AI-generated essay is a copy of a copy of a copy of someone else's thoughts and ideas because AI doesn't credit all of its sources. AI is giving students a license to plagiarize, telling them that it's acceptable when it isn't, and it's taking away a fundamental human characteristic, namely communication. 

Isolation results from non-communication. When students lose the ability to communicate authentically, they naturally want to grab and hold onto a source that they've learned to trust and have been able to rely upon over and over again, regardless of the fact that no process of active learning is taking place. AI has provided students with an easy route to a high school diploma and has even allowed them to breeze through college writing classes, but while they're moving upward on paper, they're not really advancing their literacy and learning to communicate in different situations. 

My main message to students regarding the misuse of AI in writing assignments is that they take a minute to gauge where they are right now and where they could be. If you're a student who hasn't given themselves an adequate amount of time to learn how to communicate clearly on paper, I strongly encourage you to think about what this could mean for your future. 

Use your time in high school and in college to learn the basics of writing. Practice the basics as much as possible in the classroom. Take advantage of every opportunity that your teacher or instructor gives you to write and to learn how to think critically and solve problems. You need these tools more and more in our world today. We should not be afraid to communicate with one another just because we chose to take a much less challenging path. Non-literacy isn't a sure path, and it won't move you forward.