A College Student’s Perspective on AI
— written by my son, Jacob Caputo, a second-year college student and finance major at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University
When I was in tenth grade, one of my friends in my orchestra class excitedly informed me that by leveraging a website called “ChatGPT,” I could complete any school writing assignment in seconds. Initially, I was skeptical because I had learned from previous life experiences that essentially everything in life that sounded too good to be true was (and that my friend often embellished things). Thus, I continued to complete my writing assignments using the writing knowledge that I had gained from my mom.
As time went on, and I began to hear more people begin to talk about ChatGPT, my curiosity eventually got the best of me, and I prompted ChatGPT to write a one-paragraph story about a pirate. To my surprise, it quickly output a well-written story about a pirate. Impressed by its work, I asked it to expand the story to a page, which it was able to do effortlessly. Since it had done such a good job, I was tempted to use it for my school assignments; however, I had always considered myself an ethical person (and my teachers had eventually begun using AI detectors), so I decided not to.
Looking back, I am happy that I made the decision that I did, for I did not have to stress about getting caught using AI, like some of my friends did, and more importantly, I was able to maintain and further develop the critical thinking skills and unique writing style that I had worked very hard to develop in my mom’s writing classes leading up to high school. Without critical thinking skills, I would not have done as well as I did on my high school exams and the SAT, and without a unique writing style, I would not have been able to communicate effectively in writing, a skill set that has become increasingly rare as people have begun to intentionally and unintentionally replace their writing skills with AI.
Although it is easy to misuse AI, I believe that there are ways to appropriately use it without losing one’s critical thinking skills and unique writing style. During my time in college, my professors have frequently encouraged, and in some cases required, me to leverage AI to help me complete certain assignments. After having used it in almost every way imaginable for those assignments, I have found AI to be most helpful for expediting research, summarizing lengthy documents, and giving me feedback on my essays.
For the majority of the college research papers that I have had to write thus far, I have had to consult databases to find data for the papers. Being able to use AI to locate which database(s) would be most likely to contain the data I was in search of saved me countless hours, and being able to use AI to summarize that data (what AI does best: summarize preexisting data) was very useful.
After AI helped me locate and summarize the data for my research papers, I independently prewrote, wrote, and revised my papers, and then, before I submitted my final drafts to my professors, I asked AI to give me feedback on my work. Since AI merely summarizes preexisting data, and not all data on the Internet is accurate and/or up-to-date, I had to leverage my critical thinking and writing skills during this step to determine which parts of its feedback would enhance my papers and which ones would make them worse — something that my peers without strong writing foundations regularly struggled to do.
Ultimately, by holding off on using AI until college and using it to supplement – not replace — my critical thinking skills during college, I have been able to retain and continue to grow the writing-related knowledge that I worked so hard to obtain both at school and in my mom’s writing classes, save significant amounts of time on my college writing assignments, and get A’s on all of those assignments. My college peers who have used AI to replace their critical thinking skills, unfortunately, have not been able to do the same.