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Victoria Gutierrez joined Fire on the Hill for a period of work experience this summer. Here she explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) impacted upon her time at university and what we can expect in the future.
When ChatGPT launched in 2022, I had just started my degree in International Relations & Politics. Despite the hype, AI barely featured in my early university life. Like many of my peers, who’d been through Zoom classes, skipped GCSEs, and sat half-baked A-Levels, I felt a sense of academic imposter syndrome after having my education disrupted and stagnated due to Covid-19.
I had returned to classrooms physically, but mentally, I was still catching up. It wasn’t until my final year that Generative AI (Gen AI) became ubiquitous and completely normalised on campus, cementing a true shift. Throughout, my generation saw our education continually reshaped and disrupted, completely altering the traditional university experience.
Using AI to keep up
AI has undoubtedly played a part in my studies and was interesting to experiment with. I mainly used it to help plan, structure and mark my work based on university guidelines. Juggling paid work on top of my studies to keep up with the cost of living, AI offered a convenience in shortening my planning process when my workload felt too chaotic.
AI never wrote an essay for me, but by taking my notes to tell me how to write and what to say, the crucial step of critical thinking was outsourced. This seems small, but this is the real risk, eroding our authenticity.
Universities are there to teach us how to think, not what to think. AI and algorithmic learning, if used in the wrong way, is not necessarily compatible with this goal. Given the rapid integration of AI in students’ lives, the challenge for universities is to shape the tool into one of support rather than dependency.
Need for better guardrails
When ideas become ‘outsourced,’ we lose the confidence to have original thoughts. Across every sector, we have to fight harder to sound more human, authentic and nuanced. This can be translated to the communications world. Audiences are increasingly AI-literate and can sense when a message feels synthetic. Anyone can generate ‘content’; but not everyone can connect.
AI is here, so what now? The technology is not inherently negative. While it has been absorbed into society in ways that teeter on dystopian, it does, of course, have the potential to deliver a profound benefit to humanity. AI has helped me as a student juggling work and deadlines, but it has also revealed the gap between the systems we have and the systems we need.
It can be a tool for empowerment, whether in academia or communications, when it complements rather than replaces human thought.
Looking ahead, it is clear that Gen AI tools have crept into every industry. In a shrinking job market, knowing how to use AI ethically and strategically is becoming a critical skill. If AI is now an inevitable part of the education system, institutions have to shift from reacting to guiding to keep up.
