As University students, sometimes we feel overwhelmed. We often feel like ditching a class for a movie, event, or, ironically, to catch up on missed classes. Our time is limited, preventing us from testing out our unlimited ideas. We are often told to do more with limited time. “Learn a skill, volunteer, meet people, engage in extracurriculars,” seniors will say. They tell us this, emphasising that these maxims are crucial to our education. We continue to have more to do, and then, as students, there is a need to ask two particularly pressing questions. The first of these is simple. What is education?
According to the renowned scientist Albert Einstein, education is not merely the learning of facts but “the training of the mind to think.” Today, the world is moving at an insane speed. Skills that were once praised, recognised and appreciated are becoming obsolete, and as humans, we need to evolve alongside our new reality. Hence, there is a need to use every innovation to our advantage—particularly Artificial Intelligence chatbots such as ClaudeAI, ChatGPT, and Gemini. As students, we often feel pressured to use these AI tools to maximise our time and achieve our goals.
However, Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that overreliance on chatbots can diminish critical thinking skills. This is not the first time an innovation has been predicted to amputate humans’ thinking capacity, yet we continue to break ground and ceilings. Plato, the Greek philosopher, once argued against writing; in his book, Phaedrus, he claimed writing would make us “cease to exercise memory” because we would start to rely on that which is written. Plato penned this argument down, arguing against what he, in fact, was doing. Conversely, Abraham Lincoln said, “writing is the great invention of the world.” Plato’s argument may, in some cases, be true or not, but Lincoln was right; writing was indeed a great invention by man.
Evidently, AI chatbots, like writing, are a great invention by man. These chatbots have made our lives easier as students, as today, we can brainstorm ideas, solve complex assignments, summarise bulky slides, and efficiently search for information that would not come easily but for these chatbots. They have undoubtedly made our schooling experience smoother. Yet, the second question arises: how much of an ‘easy life’ is enough to keep the essence of education alive?
The ability to think critically—deliberately slow, carefully, with importance and top-notch attention to detail—is not only the paramount quality of an educated mind, but that’s what it is made of. However, always reaching out to AI chatbots to solve deceptive questions before actually attempting them, to evaluate and summarise superficially complex slides or to discern biases in information we find online not only erodes our critical thinking but also overrides the essence of the education we claim to be getting.
The use of AI chatbots is not limited to our academic lives, as sometimes we have been tempted to convert our personal issues—religious, moral, and romantic—to prompts and feed them to AI chatbots for responses. And as with the oft-reported cases of AI chatbots being sycophantic in nature, we get answers that affirm our biases, preventing us from critically evaluating the nature of the problem itself.
Another side effect of the use of AI chatbots is AI hallucinations, a technical term used when AI chatbots present flawed and biased information confidently as facts. When AI sycophancy and hallucinations persist, we get more satisfaction and overdependence is born.
Overdependence on AI chatbots occurs when we impulsively reach out to AI for assistance with every problem. We no longer have the patience to wait and see if we can find a solution to our problems, and before we realise it, we are already typing prompts out for ChatGPT to save us. This essentially strips us of our ability to think critically, and Dr Lila Landowski puts it best: “Relying on AI excessively is like having a personal trainer lift the weights for you.” When our brain loses the ability to lift its weights, our ability to think follows, and soon enough, the main essence of education is lost.
Still, the world is racing ahead, and we can’t afford to be left behind. For this reason, we must learn to coexist with AI chatbots rather than oppose them. We must stay ahead of AI chatbots and maintain control over them—using our intellect to solve problems proactively, not merely when necessary, while safeguarding our critical thinking skills.
Being a student of the University of Ibadan can be daunting. Still, as a student of Nigeria’s premier university, it would also be humiliating to be caught with impaired critical thinking skills. As students of this university, shouldn’t we, with our critical thinking skills, show others what the actual essence of education is? Therefore, we should always stop ourselves and ask: Will using ClaudeAI for this assignment really give me more time to focus on other equally important parts of my education, or am I just choosing the easy way out?
Omoyemi Adeoye Abdulgafar