As someone who has been writing stories since I was five years old, I will say with all my heart that I have no love for AI. There is no room for this toxic infection that tries to spread throughout our society, and in my opinion, there shouldn’t be room for AI in anyone’s work in higher education. AI is something that turns brains into Jello, causing the grooves of learning that we have fought so hard for to be shaved off until all of humanity has smooth brains that don’t want to sit with a concept for more than two seconds before they become itchy with discomfort.
My sentiment on AI, it seems, is not the opinion of everyone at St. Olaf, though. I constantly hear people whispering in the halls that ChatGPT did their homework or that they created AI art for an assignment. These whispers may seem quiet, but their aftershocks will be instrumental in the downfall of society.
Now, many will say I am being dramatic, but I want people to think about this for a second. This school, unfortunately, has a very big problem with the humanities. As much as St. Olaf says it’s a liberal arts school, it tends to put STEM majors on a pedestal above the humanities. Imagine if STEM majors one day woke up to someone telling them that surgery could be done by a machine, or that their ability to memorize every muscle in a body wasn’t impressive anymore because a machine could do it. Better yet, imagine an engineering concentrator who spends 20 minutes talking about a project they are excited for, and then at the end of the conversation, someone says they could do that with ChatGPT. Would you be angry? Would you feel unvalued? Well, that’s how humanities majors feel every day when we talk about the things that we care deeply about, and then fellow students and professors say it can be done with AI.
I do not want to use AI to come up with my screenplay idea. What happened to going to books and finding inspiration there? Or better yet, talking to fellow writers and getting ideas? I do not want my assignment graded by AI — especially if it is my own idea. That is my intellectual property. How dare someone be so frivolous with it to put it into a machine and let it spew out whatever garbage it wants to say about it? My work is not created to feed a machine; I write to feed the inner children of people who feel alone. I write for the lonely kid who has no friends and only feels seen in books and to teach people the lessons they need when the world feels hopeless.
The harm of AI is not just that it devalues my hard work, but also that it has negative impacts on workers and the environment. During the AI Symposium, I learned that AI does not only affect the environment — which St. Olaf supposedly cares about a lot, given all of their statements on it — but also the well-being of the individuals whose job it is to circulate all the information behind AI. That’s right, it’s not a machine weeding through the internet, it is humans who are paid six dollars a day to destroy their brains.
And I think that is truly what makes me so angry. For a school that says that they really are against hatred and prejudice, they allow for assignments to be made that actively ask students to harm other humans. To harm people’s minds, their ecosystems, and finally, their vocations. My freshman year, I had a whole SOAR session about vocation, about finding a love in college for what you learn, and I did. I found a love for film, literature, and writing. Now, are those the most practical majors? No, but that’s not the point! They are a part of who I am, and it fills me with such disdain that so many on campus don’t think those are worthy pursuits to live by. That the things I love are just worthless garbage a machine can make.
So, in conclusion, I don’t think AI and education should mix. It doesn’t help anyone. Not the fools who miss out on gaining knowledge by not doing their readings, not the worker who gets paid six dollars a day to rot their brains, not the teacher who never gets to see their students’ efforts because they just use AI to grade. And if AI is the only way to get great grades and great ideas, then I guess I’m out of luck because I will never throw away my creativity so a machine can tell me what to do.
