Ready-Made AI Answers Leave Students Asking Fewer Questions In Bhopal
Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): The growing dependence of young students on AI to acquire knowledge and seek answers is killing their natural curiosity, creativity, analytical and social skills, besides blunting their memory, warn educators and psychiatrists in the city.
Citing the case of an IIT Bombay student who killed himself after being caught uploading his question paper on ChatGPT in the examination hall, experts say excessive dependence on AI can even make students delusional.
Aarti Sinha, Central India’s first female gong healer, shared that the worried parents of a Class 7 student recently sought her help.
The girl was refusing to go to school, arguing that since AI can tell her everything, she no longer needs a teacher. “It was so difficult for me to convince her that school is not only about learning facts,” Sinha said.
Rajesh Sharma, an educationist, said that while the schools can and do ban mobiles in classes, they can’t prevent students from using AI to complete their homework and other assignments.
“Students are increasingly using AI to do their assignments at home because that is easy,” he says. But he warns it will deeply impact their learning. “I can tell you one thing for sure.
If the use of AI by students is not curbed, we can’t hope for a 'Viksit Bharat' in 2047,” he said.
According to psychiatrist Ruma Bhattacharya, increasing dependence of children and teens on AI will eventually kill their curiosity, creativity and analytical skills.
Their minds are always bubbling with questions. But when they can get ready-made answers to their queries, it kills their critical and analytical faculties,” she said, adding that “in the long run, it will also weaken their memory as instead of racking their brains to find the answer to a question, they immediately rush to AI.”
Bhattacharya said that she has been approached by parents of students who say that their son or daughter writes very well but fumbles for words when asked to answer a question orally.
That is also the result of growing use of AI for producing neat and well-written texts. “But your vocabulary does not grow. You can’t put your ideas into words,” she added.
Aparna, a teacher at the Government Subhash Excellence Higher Secondary School, said that these days if the students are unable to understand what is taught to them in their class, they don’t ask questions to their teachers.
“They know that they can go home and use the AI to find the answers.