The Impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on University Students: An Opportunity or a Threat?

photo from google

Will the presence of AI in education help students become smarter or make them dependent on technology without developing their critical thinking skills? AI is a technology designed to mimic human intellectual abilities using computer systems to learn from experience, recognize patterns, make decisions, and complete tasks efficiently and quickly. Nowadays, AI becoming familiar in modern life, especially in the education sector. For students, AI provides various conveniences for them. Starting from the ease of accessing information to being an interactive learning tool. Although AI provides opportunities, from the visible benefits, the presence of AI actually brings negative threats to students that are much more striking and need to be considered.

First, the biggest threat AI to university students is decrease in critical thinking skills. In university, students are required to develop their analytical thinking and problem-solving skills as these are the mainstays of education. However, by relying on AI, students use this technology to complete their tasks without really understanding or analyzing the material deeply and without using thoughts from their own brains. Students make less effort to improve their critical thinking skills and more passive in their learning as they often rely on AI to answer all questions.

Second, the threat of AI to students is plagiarism. AI can threaten student academic integrity. The presence of AI-based tools that can generate assignments, reports, essays, or other academic tasks will quickly facilitate plagiarism or academic cheating. Students use AI to avoid work that requires a lot of thought from their own brains. This is not only a disadvantage to personal intellectual development, but also a serious problem for educational institutions with high academic standards.

Third, dependency on AI technology holds up the development of social skills and real-world human interactions. Based on research and studies, as more tasks are automated by AI, there is a risk that humans will always be dependent on this technology and this dependency can reduce the ability to think critically and innovatively because they don’t need to find solutions on their own. Students will also find it difficult to deal with real situations that require interpersonal skills, teamwork, and adaptability. That skills are developed through direct human interaction in real-life experiences as they can't be taught by AI. 

In conclusion, AI provides positive opportunities to improve efficiency and ease of learning, such as accelerating access to information. But the impact on students is negative, if students do not manage it wisely. AI threatens the educational process, undermines academic integrity, and discourages students from thinking critically. Therefore, students need to understand these threats and try to maintain a balance between technology utilization and individual skill development.