I saw a recent stat about how much and when ChatGPT is used. Not surprisingly, it gets a lot of usage during the school year, although a little less on the weekends. Then when summer comes the usage drops way off. This is not exactly shocking news, but it would seem to suggest that a lot of students are using AI for school. While there are certainly legitimate ways to use AI as a student (“Hey ChatGPT, can you recommend some good resources on WWII for a three-page freshman level college essay?”), there are also quite a few illegitimate ways to use it (“Hey ChatGPT, can you write a three-page paper on WWII on a college freshman level?”). Now, when I see that there is a lot of ChatGPT usage during school, I’ll admit I don’t know the breakdown between legitimate versus illegitimate usage. My guess is whatever the number is, it would probably be discouraging.

I’ve been giving this more thought recently. I’m not anti-AI. I use AI almost every day. In fact, AI proofread this post. I’m excited about the future of AI, but all cool new technologies come with dangers, and this is true for AI as well. One of my great fears is a generation that grows up learning to offload thinking to AI. This is especially on my mind as I am preparing to teach New Testament Survey to our Christian school’s juniors and seniors this year. There are multiple writing assignments, and I know how easy it is to ask ChatGPT to do the assignment and turn an hour long project into a thirty second project. But what is the cost of that? To help my students understand that, I’ve developed a modern-day reworking of the tortoise and the hare. It goes something like this…

 

The Fable

Once upon a time, in a parallel universe, there was a forest filled with little woodland creatures of all types. Unlike our universe, however, all of the animals could run at roughly the same speed, whether tortoise, hare, beaver, or wolf. In fact, when the animals began ninth grade, they started off the year with a race. While no one was particularly fast, they were all about the same speed and everyone finished within a minute or so of each other. After everyone had finished, the school gathered them up and told them that when they graduated there would be another race. This race would be one mile, and whoever won would be given a plaque, have a ceremony in their honor, and be given a one-million-dollar scholarship by a shady company so the winner could attend an overpriced elite institution of higher learning. 

Of course, all of the animals were greatly excited by this possibility, and so they all began training for the race. Of course, all of the animals were adolescents with very little discipline, and so one by one they began to drop off their training. After a few weeks it was just the tortoise and the hare left training for the big race. 

Every day, the tortoise and the hare would meet up to train and to push each other. Their training was grueling. They ran for hours in the afternoon while the other animals played. They carefully watched what they ate, because eating delicious chocolate cake would slow your running. But both the hare and the tortoise wanted to win, and so they kept at it. 

Then one day, about six months later, a wizard appeared to both animals and offered them a magic potion. This potion would make them very, very fast. In fact, one drink from this potion would make them able to run a five-minute mile! The bottle they were given would never run out, and the potion would never stop working. It would always be there when they needed it. But there was a catch. You wouldn’t improve or get faster as a runner while using the potion. You could only get faster by training without the potion, and the potion could only get you to a five-minute mile. It couldn’t do any more than that. 

At this point, the tortoise and the hare had been running eleven-minute miles. The hare decided this was a no-brainer. Five minutes was a lot less than eleven minutes! What was the point of training and working when one drink from this bottle would make him incredibly fast? Why would he keep missing out on fun with his friends, keeping to a strict diet, and going through the tiring work of running all the time when all he had to do was take a quick drink? How much easier could the choice be? So he stopped training and went back to living his life.

But the tortoise thought he could beat that time. He couldn’t necessarily explain why, but it just felt wrong to take the potion when he could get there by training. So he didn’t drink the potion, and he kept on running. After the first year, he was down to a nine and a half minute mile. After the second year, he was down to a seven minute mile. By the end of his junior year, the tortoise had fought and clawed his way to a six minute mile. 

One day in the middle of their senior year, the hare watched the tortoise train. He timed the tortoise without the tortoise knowing it. Five minutes and twenty-three seconds. The hare panicked. What if the tortoise could beat the time? The hare tried running without the potion just to see if he could maybe train and catch up to the tortoise. His time was twelve minutes. He was stuck. He knew there was no way he would be able to train enough on his own to get ready in time. It was too late. So with a knot in his stomach he went back to hanging out with his friends and living as he had before, dreading the coming race. 

Sure enough, the day came. The hare drank the potion right before running and the potion did its magic. He ran the mile in five minutes and three seconds. That was a great time. In fact, it was the second best time. As for the tortoise? The tortoise ran in four minutes and forty-three seconds. His diligence and discipline had paid off. His hard work had been rewarded. That night the tortoise went home a champion.

And the moral of this story is that magic fixes work really well in the short run, but they end up costing you more than you realize in the long run. 

 

What Have We Learned Today?

One of the easiest, quickest uses of ChatGPT and other AI tools is writing. A quick prompt can write pages worth of assignments in seconds. So why not use it? What’s the harm? The harm, as this silly little story is trying to point out, is that when you miss out on the work, you don’t grow. When you write, or solve math problems, or read long books, you must think slowly and carefully. You must evaluate and synthesize. Your brain should hurt when you’re done. And when you think, you grow and become better. It’s only by a little, and you can’t see it in the moment, but it is true growth. Stack that growth up over a decade, and you’ll notice the difference. 

Now, you can have ChatGPT write your assignment for you, or do your math homework, or summarize a book you were supposed to read, and maybe your teacher will never know. No one is going to notice a difference in you tomorrow if you have an AI do an assignment for you today. But if you do that consistently over 15 years, you will fall behind. And then people will notice. Sadly, many in America think that education is about getting a piece of paper that says I’m qualified for a job, rather than a process of preparing yourself to think critically, to develop necessary skills, and to generally level up so that when you get that job you are ready to excel at it. Yes, I think most jobs (mine included) will need to figure out how and when to get the most out of AI. But the people who are best at AI are the people who know how to think, and paradoxically you won’t learn to think if you offload all your thinking to AI. And typing my homework into an AI model and having it spit out answers isn’t really preparing me for my future, it’s helping me avoid my responsibilities today. So students be warned. You can take a swig of the magic potion today and not have to do any hard mental work. But your classmates might be taking the harder route and training, and one day you just might find them running past you. 

 

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Ben Hicks is the Associate Pastor at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Indianapolis. This article originally appeared on his Substack.