Mental Health Tolls, Climate Costs and more; the Untold Truth of AI’s Impact.
Now that Artificial Intelligence (AI) software has been in the public eye for almost three years, the conversation has begun to turn from short-term effects–ease of its usage, inaccuracies on AI chatbots’ parts and inauthentic submissions of work–to issues regarding long-term effects on humanity. Younger generations’ brain development is especially at risk, as well as the speeding issue of climate change worldwide, if AI usage progresses as it currently is.
As for outcomes of AI in school settings, a big concern is that teachers no longer get their students’ genuine work. High school takes place during a formative period of life in which habits start to get solidified in the brain and it’s crucial to develop critical thinking and emotional skills that AI may chip away at. Samo AP Psychology teacher Charles Thun commented on how students used AI in past years before teachers were able to track usage.
“I think some of the students were just solely having AI do everything for them and it was really detrimental; they had no idea what they were learning–they weren’t learning anything,” Thun said.
Art by Sara Polster
Youths’ long-term mental health struggles alongside the usage of AI chatbots has also been revealed as a major liability. This past year, Adam Raine’s death on April 11, indicated that these technologies have already formed lasting impacts on mental health. Adam Raine was a 16-year-old who opened up to his personal ChatGPT bot. This chatbot ended up aiding in Raine’s suicide and convincing him not to tell anyone else about his depression. Teens and young adults are statistically very vulnerable to mental health issues, and Raine’s suicide has brought up heavy discourse that chatbots need stricter limits and harsher regulations. As this case sticks out as evidence that youth are at risk with certain parts of this technology.
As well as emotional damage, AI may also affect logical thinking skills in the human brain. A study from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was conducted on 54 people aged 18-39. They were split into groups and wrote multiple SAT essays using either Chat GPT, Google’s search engine, or no outside sources, based on their group assignment. Their brain activity was monitored during each essay writing session and researchers found that the group using Chat GPT underachieved significantly in comparison to the other groups in brain activity and became more careless with their essay production over the course of the study.
“We’ll get adjusted to AI over time and learn how it’s helping us and hurting us and try to steer away from the harms… we have a human tendency, though, to be kind of lazy, so we’ll have to really take a true stock of it–how it’s helping us and hurting us,” said Thun.
For students who want to continue on to college, getting good grades is often held more highly than being interested in or really understanding the work. Students who use AI chatbots to help them with work can become reliant on it, and when college application time comes, they may use these chatbots to answer PIQs and help with essay writing. Ernesto Flores, a Samo college and career counselor, shares his opinion on AI’s role in college applications.
“I do personally feel that the essay component [of the application process] is something so important because it allows students to use their voice to literally talk about themself,” Flores said.“The key thing there is ‘their own voice’, to try and personalize it, so though AI may assist students in getting ideas down, I’d hope that students aren’t relying on it…the genuineness of their own voice, thoughts and experiences may not be relayed if students are using AI.”
In recent online conversation, AI’s effects on the environment have also become a leading source of discussion. Currently, there are no regulations around AI companies disclosing their energy and water consumption, so AI organizations tend to be broad in statements about the amount of water the technology uses up. The FAQ on OpenAI doesn’t include any information about water or energy usage. Shaolei Ren, an engineer who is currently an Associate Professor at University of California, Riverside, was pushed by the lack of clarity on the topic to personally hire a team and find out how much water ChatGPT-3 took up. Ren’s team estimated that hundreds of thousands of gallons of freshwater were used to train the model. A different company, the Grainger College of Engineering’s Center for Secure Water, also had findings that were about 550,000 gallons of water per day, with daily usage.
Recently, many policymakers worldwide and in the country have called for assessments from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) surrounding AI’s effects on the environment. With scientists predicting that the world has less than a decade left before the worst effects of climate change become irreversible, the introduction of AI to this equation brings bad implications for the planet.
Bigger issues are arising in AI usage from environmental, emotional and psychological standpoints. This technology has become more widely acknowledged as a potential danger to humans, as well as an aid. AI has encroached on educational life and may irreparably impact ecosystems, which has caused some to call for–and continue calling for–stricter guidelines.