By Saktisri Gowrishankar, Staff Reporter
The year is 2040. You wake up to the sound of your alarm at 10 a.m., step onto your robot hoverboard and unlock your phone to ask ChatGPT-600 to generate you something for breakfast before going to the bathroom where your toilet speaks to you and your mirror also functions as your dermatologist.
Okay, I concede, this probably — hopefully — will not be anyone’s reality in 16 years, but with AI, this dystopian future is not out of reach. The negative effects of AI manifest in numerous areas such as education, art and perhaps most concerningly, climate change.
In education, students have become more reliant on AI for completing assignments. With a simple ctrl+C and ctrl+V, you can run your teacher’s assignment through a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT and receive nearly perfect answers. Just tweak the wording a bit, and it is like the LLM was never there in the first place.
A 2023 Pew Research survey done by Luona Lin found that 34% of high school teachers thought AI was doing more harm than good for their students, and I agree. By using technology instead of your own skills for everything, you cannot grow intellectually and run the risk of falling behind in your academic career.
When it comes to art and media, AI really becomes controversial. People generate images they call “art,” create videos for social media and even deepfake others. My problem with AI art is that it is unoriginal, uninspired and unnecessary. It is okay to not be good at art, but do not use generative AI to play pretend as an artist. Art is a distinctly human concept, and using a computer that only speaks in zeroes and ones to make “art” feels like a slight against humanity itself.
The environmental impact of AI might be the cherry on top of this ugly, bitter-tasting sundae of problems. Training one AI model requires thousands of megawatt-hours of electricity and hundreds of tons of carbon emissions. The cooling systems of data centers also deplete our already minimal freshwater resources. Additionally, sustaining the amount of electricity needed for LLMs and other models requires huge amounts of fossil fuel energy, actively worsening air pollution and climate change.
Shaolei Ren, associate professor at the University of California, Riverside and Adam Wierman, Carl F Braun Professor at the California Institute of Technology, expanded upon the problem in their article for the Harvard Business Review. The professors reported, “All these environmental impacts are expected to escalate considerably, with the global AI energy demand projected to exponentially increase to at least 10 times the current level and exceed the annual electricity consumption of a small country like Belgium by 2026.”
I do not think it is a bad thing to use AI to summarize a difficult passage in your reading or brainstorm a list of topics to study for your test, but when students become overdependent on AI to complete every task, it gets muddy. AI strips us of core human values, like intellectualism and art, and destroys the environment.
I urge all of you to think twice the next time you want to use AI to fill out a five-question assignment or generate a silly video for Instagram Reels. Ask yourself if it is necessary. We all need to preserve our humanity as much as we can and offset the harm a fully digital age might cause. Use human intelligence, not artificial intelligence.
Saktisri Gowrishankar can be reached at [email protected].
