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“I have ethical concerns about the way that (AI) operates. The way that they, the companies, place the servers in vulnerable communities and use up the water. I’ve read up a bit on that, and I’ve decided for myself not to use generative AI as much as I can.
I am a person who considers myself an activist, and if I betray my values, then that makes me not have moral integrity. It’s about my morals. Because I haven’t found an ethical way to use AI, I have abstained from using AI as a whole for now.
I am pretty against AI in learning. I hear a lot of students (giving) advice to their friends on how to cheat with AI, and that concerns me. Instead of just using AI as a tool to optimize their learning, they’re using it as a sort of second brain that thinks instead of them.
It’s very easy to cheat. The human brain is very adaptable, and it’s no secret that it’s adaptable because it’s lazy. So when the human brain finds a reason to do less, it’s very easy to fall into that, and to find excuses to be like, ‘Well, it’s easier to do with AI. I’ll get more time with my friends and family instead of doing this stupid assignment.’ And even though I am very cautious of AI usage, sometimes I’m like, ‘It would be so easy to just put this assignment through ChatGPT, and just have it done in five minutes instead of three hours.’
“Because I haven’t found an ethical way to use AI, I have abstained from using AI as a whole for now.”
ALEX EFREMOVA
One of the biggest issues that I’ve seen teachers struggle with, in my recent years of high school, is that it’s very hard to prove AI usage. Of course, there’s programs that detect AI, but they are also faulty. Most of the teachers I had last year in my high school have stated explicitly at the beginning of the course that they are very against AI usage.
One of my teachers said that she has no direct way to prove AI usage. It will be on the student’s conscience. It will also just worsen their learning experience. So that’s really about as much as teachers can do with this, is discourage their students from using AI. Maybe it’ll work in some cases, but in most cases I think that if someone already uses AI and they establish it as a pattern in their life, they wouldn’t just listen to a teacher.
AI dumbs you down if you use it constantly. You just lose those functions in your brain. It’s a muscle you have to train. My dad says, ‘Well, we used to plow the fields and now we don’t, and so have we lost those muscles.’ That’s the constant conversation that goes on at my house, and I wish I had a definitive answer about whether or not this technology is different from any of the other ones that were created to sort of dumb us down.”
Alex Efremova graduated from Gunn High School this year. Efremova plans to study anthropology in the fall at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
This profile is one of nineteen featured in the “Humans in an age of AI” portrait series. See more profiles here.
