Duy Anh, Ha, The - 1

Phan Duy Anh

Phan Ngoc Ha

Dinh Thanh The

Vu Thi Diem Phuc

Business Communication 2

May 21th 2024

ChatGPT and handwriting – which is really student-friendly?

Although the term artificial intelligence, better known as AI, was first coined by John

McCarthy in 1955, it has not been a topic of interest until OpenAI launched its first chatbot

dubbed ChatGPT at the end of 2022. The dawn of ChatGPT is extremely disruptive as it

changes the way people interact with data and information significantly. Instead of manually

searching for information on different websites and then creating their own works by

themselves from data collected, most people adopt the behavior of typing keywords into

ChatGPT and waiting for personalized responses to be generated within seconds. Among

those enthusiastic adopters are unsurprisingly university students who leverage ChatGPT to

support them with their homework or project. While some people see ChatGPT as an

opportunity for students to improve their studying, others are concerned it may not be as

effective as the traditional studying method without internet connection. In this essay, we will

analyze both viewpoints and show our justification in support of the latter.

On the one hand, handwriting offers students two main benefits. First, handwriting

enhances students’ memory. In fact, as stated by Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, the effort put

into a particular task will be directly proportional to our memory. This is understandable in

the context of university when students, if opting for hand-writing, must listen attentively to

the lecturer while summarizing and noting information as quickly as possible. The process of
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summarizing, indeed, requires great understanding of the lecture and the ability to rephrase

the material in the writer’s own words without distorting its original meaning. By doing so,

students can more easily encode the information received into their brain, improving latter

recall. As evidenced by the article Is typewriting more resources-demanding than handwriting

in undergraduate students on Springer, the result of its experiment confirms that: “Overall,

handwriting led to better recall than typing, particularly with the longest lists of words”.

With better memory, students could follow their academic education more effortlessly and

have more potential to achieve high scores in exams. Second, without internet connection,

students must rely on themselves to generate ideas, which boosts their creativity significantly.

The fact in today’s technological age is that students, faced with problems such as questions

or homework, will immediately search for solutions online. This, however, deprives them of

the opportunity to actually analyze and understand the issues, hindering their problem-solving

mindset and creativity.

On the other hand, however, advocates of ChatGPT have reasons to prove that in-class use

of ChatGPT can actually boost creativity. Particularly, ChatGPT can support students to

expand upon their original ideas. In fact, generating new ideas proves to be an arduous

process, which, in most cases, still cannot guarantee students decent ideas. However, if

students have access to ChatGPT in class, they will have many different views on the

problem at hand, which lubricates their thinking and idea generating process remarkably.

This idea has been confirmed by Cecilia Ka Yuk Chan and Wenxin Zhou on Deconstructing

Student Perceptions of Generative AI (GenAI) through an Expectancy Value Theory (EVT)-

based Instrument as followed: “GenAI tools are also believed to be useful research aids for

generating ideas, synthesizing information, and summarizing a vast amount of text data to

help researchers analyze data and compose their writing”.

However, this argument has a weakness. Particularly, the information given by chat GPT

can often be deceiving. AI has the learning method of absorbing everything that is provided,

instead of the panning for gold method, which filters out all the false information. Therefore,

the knowledge you get from it can likely be unreliable and will be invalid towards your

academic classes. A study by researchers from Stanford and UC Berkeley found that

ChatGPT’s accuracy in tasks such as identifying prime numbers and generating computer

code has decreased over time. For instance, GPT-4’s accuracy in identifying prime numbers

dropped from nearly 98% to less than 3% between March and June 2023. Moreover, AI can

answer a question with general ideas without much depth. As the more academic you go, the

more you need to penetrate into the question to interpret it thoroughly and understand the gist

of it. That is when chat GPT becomes less and less helpful with its shallow knowledge.

Additionally, from my point of view when using chat GPT, the words they use are too flashy

and artistic, which is not what a typical student would seek for when trying to generate

answers. Consequently, it can lead to misunderstanding between humans and AI.

Nevertheless, the primary reason we strongly advocate for banning ChatGPT from the

classroom lies in its negative impact on students' cognitive thinking skills and the ethical

concerns it presents.

That’s yet to mention some additional harmful effects ChatGPT poses on users. First, Chat

GPT should be forbidden in classes due to its harmful effect towards critical thinking. When

there is an allowance to use AI inside the classroom, students tend to be too dependent on the

generated quick-answers, neglecting mindful thoughts to further understand the questions

more deeply. In other words, students only know the answer, they don't interpret it

thoroughly. Assessment from ASPG has shown the severe consequences of over-relying on

AI towards a student’s critical thinking and problem solving skills, with an alarming 8.13/10

on the poor effect rating scale. Moreover, Chat GPT will also hinder active learning, a type of
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learning which is crucial for critical thinking. To elaborate, when an answer to a question is

given to you within the matters of seconds, you will neglect the most wonderful instincts of a

human being: questioning, analyzing and synthesizing the information in a logical way. The

lack of motivation to self-learn will ultimately result in no actual development of logical

thinking skills, your IQ will stagnate and you can only absorb information passively, just like

a robot. The U.S. Department of Education highlights the risk of over-reliance on AI, which

can lead to a more passive learning experience where students receive automated responses

rather than engaging in dynamic discussions with their teachers (U.S. Department of

Education).

Second, artificial Intelligence in educational settings not only retains students' critical

thinking skills but also raises ethical concerns. One of the main issues is a lack of human

connections. Face-to-face interactions in the classroom have always been regarded as one of

the most important elements. When students interact through discussions, they are

encouraged to justify their reasoning and view it from different perspectives. Compared to

simply getting an answer from Chat GPT, this active learning method leads to a deeper

understanding of knowledge. Teachers can provide emotional support and understand

students' individual needs and learning styles, something AI cannot. Personalized experience

allows students to approach learning with curiosity and openness, and increases their

willingness to face challenges, leading to a more rewarding educational journey.

With the increasing use of AI, interpersonal connections might be affected. The lack of

human interaction turns students into passive recipients of information, not people with

different perspectives and rationales. This isolated learning experience can detrimentally

affect students' motivation, engagement, and emotional well-being, including decreased

empathy and understanding among individuals. Students might also not receive the

personalized guidance they require to reach their full potential. “AI is not a human. It doesn't
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have relationships. It doesn't have a history. It's not part of a culture. It doesn't have an

understanding of students' individual needs. It can't be expected to inspire students, in terms

of directions and future thinking. It doesn't understand social-emotional learning and mental

health issues. It doesn't understand the family context of students. There are very many things

that teachers remain critical for and always will remain critical for.” - Said Glenn Kleiman,

senior adviser at the Stanford Graduate School of Education

In conclusion, despite its game-changing benefit of boosting students’ creativity, ChatGPT

poses more threats concerning unqualified data, hindered critical thinking and ethical matters.

In contrast, handwriting offers students enhanced creativity and memory, which not only

serves them well during study sessions in university but also brightens their career path. For

that reason, our group strongly supports teachers to prohibit the use of ChatGPT in-class and

require compulsory handwritten work from students.