As generative AI seeps into virtually every aspect of our daily lives through jobs, entertainment, and even food, you gotta wonder: is anyone not on board with the AI takeover?
Apparently not. Former McKinsey analyst turned Dartmouth University professor Scott Anthony told Fortune that one of the feelings he’s seeing more and more among college students isn’t excitement for the AI future, but utter terror.
“One of the things that really surprises me consistently is how scared our students are of using it,” Anthony said of large language models (LLMs). The fear isn’t just over typical academic issues like cheating, he told Fortune, but about losing their critical thinking skills to the machine — they’re “scared full stop.”
“There’s something about AI where people, I think, worry that they’ll lose their humanity if they lean too much into it,” Anthony explained. “History teaches me very clearly that in the middle of a change like this, it’s very messy.”
The Dartmouth prof contrasted his student’s anxieties 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 this is the case — with a cushy gig at one of the nation’s elite universities, Dartmouth faculty are free from the economic horror story that is the AI boom. For students entering today’s job market, the future looks far less secure.
But even beyond career viability, students’ anxieties that AI use could make them dumber aren’t unfounded. One headline-inducing study from MIT earlier this summer split participants into three groups to compete tasks like writing essays: one which used LLMs, one which used common search engines, and one “brain only group.”
Compared to the other groups, the researchers found that the LLM group had an easier time writing their essays, though this “came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users’ inclination to critically evaluate the LLM’s output or ‘opinions,’” the paper explained. Basically, the group using AI gravitated toward an echo chamber moderated by AI, not by their own brains.
On top of that, 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 scared.
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