Introduction
AI has been mainstreamed for around 2 years now and it keeps getting more and more popular everyday. A large majority of people use AI throughout their daily lives. Whether it’s for work, school, or even just for a simple question on their mind. AI can be positive and negative for numerous reasons, and people have many different opinions on it.
Cheating On Work and Assessments
One of the major issues with AI in schools is that students are using AI to cheat on work and assessments. Students can type a question that they don’t understand into Chat-GPT, Gemini, or any other AI program and it will generate an answer for them to copy. This will cause students to become lazy and dependent on the tool because if they don’t understand a question or don’t know what to write for an essay, it becomes a major issue. Instead of writing something down and trying their best to answer it, they can just copy the answer word for word that the AI chat-bot generated for them. This causes the students not to think for themselves anymore when doing homework , or completing an assessment because they can just have a chat-bot do it for them. Because so many students use AI to write their work for them, many teachers have been able to figure out if a student used AI or not based on the writing structure, and if there is any information included that doesn’t have anything to do with what the student learned about during class.
Grading Work Incorrectly
This next issue only has to do with teachers who use AI to grade students’ work. Using AI to grade students’ work might seem like a good thing at first because it will give teachers more time to themselves after school hours. But using AI to grade assignments isn’t all that great. There are a bunch of problems when using AI to grade such as incorrect information or spelling mistakes. Another problem is that if the AI bot is only trained with knowing a certain amount of information, it might not be able to pick up on students who have certain writing disadvantages, like if they are new to learning English, the AI might not detect that based on how they write and the AI would grade their work with a low score. Another problem with using AI to grade students’ work is that sometimes, it will detect actual legitimate writing for information that was copied and pasted from somewhere online. This could lead to students who actually tried their best on their work to get a low grade compared to students who used AI to cheat on their work and they still get a decent grade. Teachers using AI to grade work isn’t a good thing and overall it can lead to many problems. Teachers manually grading work is a much better option than having AI do it.
Decrease in Critical Thinking
Another major problem with AI is that it negatively impacts the way people think. According to a study conducted in 2025 by Gerlich, people who heavily rely on AI tools and software within their everyday life are more likely to struggle with independent reasoning and thinking. Another contributing factor is called “cognitive offloading”. Cognitive offloading is when people who regularly use AI interact with less in depth thinking and prefer to use quick AI-generated thinking. This study made by Gerlich also explored the impact of age and education on AI reliance. This study showed that younger people had a stronger dependence on AI and had lower critical thinking skills compared to older people who had the opposite effect as the younger people. People with a level of higher education showed better reasoning abilities even while they were exposed to AI. This study concludes that younger people rely on AI more than older people who use AI less. This study also focused on the effects of people who use AI more compared to the people who don’t. It came down to the fact that younger people have less critical thinking abilities than older people after using AI, even when the older people were exposed to AI, their thinking abilities were still higher.
“Cognitive Debt”
“Cognitive Debt” is a term used to describe people who lose intelligence and their critical thinking skills which are caused by the overuse of AI, which decreases the ability for them to think for themselves since they are so used to having AI help them with everything. MIT conducted research about how Chat-GPT affects the brain and how it can lead to cognitive debt. About 54 student participants were being assessed over the course of 4 months and were placed into 3 groups; the Chat-GPT/LLM group which used Chat-GPT for writing their essays, the Search Engine Group which used only search engines like Google and no AI, and the Brain-only group which wrote essays using their memory and reasoning. Once the study was done, some of the key things found were that the more AI assistance was given, key brain networks such as memory, attention, and executive function were less visible and not really seen. Most of the people who used AI found it difficult to remember what they had written about and they had forgotten important quotes from their essays. Some of the people who used AI also denied the fact that they used AI to write their essays for them, while others came clean and told the truth. The Search Engine Group scored higher scores on their essays than the group that used AI. This study concluded that the cognitive debt shown during this study illustrated the short-term benefit of productivity was lower and that it could lead to long-term effects in critical thinking, creativity, learning, and an increased memory capacity.
