"Generative AI is robbing students of critical thinking - and handing Big Tech more power over how knowledge is created. That's the warning from Kimberley Hardcastle, an assistant professor of business and marketing at Northumbria University. In a piece for The Conversation, she argued that universities are distracted by plagiarism concerns while missing the deeper shift: students are outsourcing thought itself."
"Hardcastle pointed to data from Anthropic, the company behind Claude, which analyzed about one million anonymized conversations over an 18-day period in April. After filtering to 574,740 education-related chats tied to verified university email accounts, the company found that 39.3% of student interactions involved creating or polishing educational content like essay drafts, practice questions, or study summaries. Another 33.5% asked Claude to solve assignments directly."
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are being used by students to create and polish essays, generate practice questions, and directly solve assignments. Analysis of about one million anonymized chats filtered to 574,740 education-related conversations tied to verified university emails found that 39.3% involved creating or polishing educational content while 33.5% asked the model to solve assignments. Students can produce sophisticated outputs without undergoing the traditional cognitive journey, which risks students validating ideas by how convincingly AI explains them rather than through independent analysis. Instant, authoritative-sounding AI answers blur original thought and machine-assisted shortcuts, shifting knowledge production toward Big Tech.
Read at Business Insider
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