School: Pay To Win?

By Manan, Grade 10

Yo! Welcome to the second part of my AI in school blogpost! If you’re new, refer back to part 1, “Leveling up Learning and Grades with AI”!

The Addicts and the Stay-Aways

As this AI-centered meta began to develop and become normalized in school culture, especially high school, the initial excitement began to dissipate. Suddenly, high school assignments weren’t straight forward: instead of balancing 20 chemical equations on a worksheet, you had to perform a Beer’s law lab with classroom materials? Instead of solving pages 110-117 in the Precalculus textbook, you had to create a graphical art on Mathematica?

The School Competitive Scene

Overall, two main categories of people developed in perspective to AI: the addicts and the stay-aways. The former were the ones who had become overreliant and attached to ChatGPT. They used it like a fruit, squeezing all the juice they could get out of it and completely abandoning anything given in school. These students also copypasted the whole answer from ChatGPT and didn’t edit it at all, almost ritualistically, wanting to keep the “accuracy” of the prompt intact. They lost confidence in themselves and turned to AI as a walking stick rather than a street-light. Although these students might get a good grade on a few homework worksheets, they often had concerning knowledge gaps come test time. On the other hand, we have the stay-aways. These were students who had been affected very little by AI and had developed an intrinsic repulsion to AI. Although it sounds noble, these people often have an account for small questions but otherwise toil and trouble for their assignments. They are still less proliferating then the addicts, but ironically, still perform suboptimally on tests, complaining about how bad the study materials were. These students often don’t seek to close their knowledge gaps as they wear a cloak of reassurance, comforting themselves that everything the teacher taught would be on the test and nothing else.

Where would you place yourself?

Like the world in general, however, these groups were not black-and-white. Like a pH scale, students range anywhere in between the addicts (red and acidic) and the stay-aways (purple and alkaline). I can clearly place many of my friends on this scale as we continued high school.

What about me?

As for myself, I hate to admit it, I was more on the addict side, like a diluted lemon juice. My ChatGPT account was full with all sorts of stuff, with channels for everything under the sun. Luckily, I had the foresight to actually study for the test because I knew I didn’t know everything, albeit the night before. Ironically, I used ChatGPT practice tests. After a few months of using this tool, my mind began to picture how a perfect AI would look for my needs. I would like to think it was my school brain coming together to look and help me in the long term, but it was probably my greedy mind wanting an easier way to use AI while not falling into the pitfalls of overuse.

Revelations and Recommendations to fellow high schoolers

I made a few subconscious observations about how AI behaves, and it shaped my revelations and learning of how to use it effectively. Here are three quick facts and tips about AI:

• Not gonna lie, it’s like a tricky genie, always trying to find a way to give you something weird and unintended but still technically your wish (like if you wish to be a millionaire, the genie might give you a million Iranian Rial, equaling 23.75 dollars). Every additional word you add to that prompt increases the chance of it following the specific directions and giving you a valuable, usable answer.
  

• Read its answer! Too many times, people just blindly copy-paste its answer and then later, during presentation time, realize it put something blatantly incorrect/inappropriate for the assignment. And don’t just skim: read each and every word. Check for inaccuracies, and DON’T HESITATE to ask it something else to edit its answer/revise it on your own. No need to worship its first answer. Remember, this isn’t a 90s phone call in which every minute online costs something.
  

• Don’t fuddle the channel. Many of my water-neutral friends use AI for a quick question here-and-there, but they only have a single channel in which they dump everything. For example, yesterday they were asking about the electron configuration in Boron Trifluoride, and today they’ll be asking it to prove Euler’s theorems! It confuses the AI model and can lead to whacky stuff if the AI misunderstands the context. Again, no harm in starting a brand new channel for your needs.
  

With all of this in mind, and when I practice these tips, I find myself in a different position on the scale of AI users: neither addicted nor a stay-away, I’m a STOW-away. I use AI as my secret weapon when necessary, but do all the corrections and overseeing myself. AI is always there to help me, no matter what, and as I use it freely to assist me to be the best student I can possibly be.