From Mohammad Tariqur Rahman
In this era of chatbots, the old adage of “practice makes perfect” is more than a proverb.
Regularly driving on the same road makes us skilled to the extent that doing so is possible without much active attention. Taking a turn or stopping at a signal becomes more spontaneous than it was during the first few days of driving on the same route.
It’s as if the brain is capable of deciding spontaneously without much active attention from us. In fact, engaging the brain repeatedly in certain actions makes it more efficient. A phenomenon called neuroplasticity allows the brain to change and form new neural connections in response to experience and training.
Herein lies the urgency to reduce dependency on the use of chatbots in academia to do the creative part of thinking for us. Ironically, we find it convenient and efficient to use chatbots to write everything from a conventional email to a complex document.
We use chatbots to analyse data or to generate a research proposal. The end result is superb, but against the backdrop of this superb “creative” output, our brain remains inactive without any neural communication.
From the perspective of neuroplasticity, engaging the brain is vital to evolving our creative cognitive ability. Just as writing and reading aloud helps synaptic ignition, thinking does the same in a similar manner to activate the brain’s potential for creative cognitive exercise.
Dependency on chatbots, on the other hand, whether for composing a simple email or a complex document, not only blocks the brain from evolving but also turns it into a rusty grey matter incapable of creative cognitive exercise.
A recent study conducted at MIT concluded that using ChatGPT to help write essays can lead to “cognitive debt” and a “likely decrease in learning skills”. It has also been previously argued that use of AI might result in a widespread “dumbing down” or decline in critical thinking ability.
However, access and convenience to perform a task with an immediate, almost flawless output makes it nearly impossible to resist using chatbots at every level or for any kind of task in academia.
Teachers and lecturers prepare lecture notes and questions using chatbots. Students prepare assignments, write reports, and a thesis using chatbots. Moreover, during open-book exams, students bring answers to potential questions prepared by AI-assisted chatbots.
Hence, schools, colleges, and universities are forced to adopt policies for the permissible use of chatbots for the learners and educators. With minor variations, permission to allow chatbots is mostly prohibited to writing assignments, theses, and reports. Generally, lecturers and teachers have more freedom to use chatbots than students.
The favour for the teachers and lecturers is primarily based on the argument that they know how to use chatbots more appropriately. Technically speaking, using AI-assisted writing tools such as Grammarly can also stop one from learning how to write correctly, unless the author carefully reviews and comprehends the suggested edits.
At administrative layers, the employers are also happy with more efficient outputs by the officers and clerks who use chatbots to prepare administrative documents. Taken together, a vital question arises on how to determine the threshold beyond which any AI-assisted tool should not be permissible in academia, or more importantly, will not reduce the synaptic ignition.
Given the circumstances, using AI tools to perform academic tasks is unavoidable. At the same time, everyone must master using AI tools. Merely providing guidelines to identify where AI tools are permissible for the sake of performance assessments would not suffice to achieve the goal of creating new generations with creative cognitive skills in the digital era of chatbots.
Finding a way to use AI-assisted tools without compromising our synaptic ignition, and evolving our cognitive skills, remains a challenge. In every academic programme, offering a selected number of courses or a major part of every course in a conventional manner, (i.e., all activities of teaching, learning and assessments without any AI-assisted tools) could be an option.
Or else, behind the curtain of frequent use of chatbots, we might be missing the double-edged sword of using them. The dependency on chatbots that results in decreased synaptic ignition not only risks our cognitive skills being replaced by AI, it also paves the way for AI to physically replace us from our jobs.
Mohammad Tariqur Rahman is a professor and the deputy executive director (development, research and innovation) of Universiti Malaya’s International Institute of Public Policy and Management.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.