Corruption of the cerebral variety

With the advent of automation and artificial intelligence (AI), educators are facing unprecedented challenges.
Now plagiarism and digital cheating have become hard to track down. Already dubbed a cut-and-paste generation of netizens, our students have AI tools at their disposal. Already creatively bankrupt, students hate to exert themselves in easy homework assignments, say, writing an essay or translating a paragraph.
Addicted to early satiation of their inquisitive queries because of search engines on the internet, AI apps like ChatGPT have made them shirk employing their imagination in creative tasks. AI-aided written renderings create a trust deficit between educators and learners. Accordingly, educators fail in gauging the actual academic worth and competence of learners.
Besides, they cannot help them out in case of any snags and bottlenecks in their studies. The cliché goes that if we hide anything from a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher, they cannot prescribe the right remedy for our malady, and the situation can go out of control. This is precisely what is happening.
Educators will have to devise strategies to make learners use their own faculty of thinking and reasoning as much as possible. To cope with AI challenges, random testing is quite a handy tool. The already attempted assignment should be reassigned to attempt extempore in the presence of teachers and in the absence of all digital resources.
The learners’ blowback disillusionment in this exercise may induce integrity in them to use their own creative faculty. Viva voce and interview, two academic bogeymen, serve as a litmus test for evaluating the learners’ true academic worth and depth. Interviews bring about academic screening via physical presence. Learners, for their part, must demonstrate sincerity when accomplishing any creative task on their own.
They will realise how unique and nourishing the elation felt at the consummation of some unalloyed artistic endeavour is. Only the creator can experience the majesty and magnanimity that creation leads to.
Our students’ writing expertise is already tattered: “the essential standards of essay writing like conceptual clarity, research-based knowledge of the subject and the argument based on logical reasoning” were found absent in the essay writing, as noted in the Central Superior Services (CSS) 2020 annual report. Out of many caveats for the users of AI apps in writing composition, one is that it instils perfectionism in them, which is not always a healthy sign. For instance, AI editing apps point out grammatical and syntactical errors, making the writers over-conscious about their writing styles and language. Rhythm evaporates in writings that are choreographed with virtual assistants. Mindfulness needed to flesh out ideas is shaken because of writers’ distraction by software suggestions.
M NADEEM NADIR
KASUR CHUNIAN