As generic AI penetrates nearly every aspect of our daily lives through jobs, entertainment, and even food, you have to wonder: Is there any No On board with AI acquisitions?
apparently not. Former McKinsey analyst turns Dartmouth University professor Scott Anthony told Luck One of the emotions he’s seeing more and more among college students is not excitement for the AI future, but outright terror.
“One thing that constantly surprises me is how afraid our students are to use it,” Anthony said of the Large Language Model (LLM). He said the fear is not just about general academic issues like cheating. LuckBut about losing their critical thinking skills to the machine – they’re “scared.”
“There’s something about AI where people, I think, worry that if they lean into it too much they’ll lose their humanity,” Anthony explained. “History teaches me very clearly that in the midst of this kind of change, it’s very messy.”
The Dartmouth professor compared his student’s concerns to those of his fellow tenured professors, who are typically eager to try out the latest LLM software. It’s not hard to see why — with a comfortable schedule at one of the nation’s elite universities, the Dartmouth faculty is free from the economic horror story that is the AI boom. For students entering today’s job market, the future looks much less secure.
But even beyond career feasibility, students’ concerns that using AI could fool them is not unfounded. One title-inducing study Earlier this summer, MIT divided participants into three groups to compete in tasks such as writing essays: one that used LLM, one that used normal search engines, and a “brain-only group.”
Compared to the other groups, the researchers found that the LLM group found it easier to write their essays, although this “came at a cognitive cost, reducing users’ inclination to critically evaluate the LLMs’ output or ‘opinions’,” the paper reported. Basically, a group using AI gravitates towards an echo chamber driven by AI, not by its own brain.
Additionally, participants in the brain-only group reported “higher satisfaction” with their essays, and “demonstrated higher brain connectivity” than the others.
In other words, it seems Gen Z has a right to be afraid.
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