Why Students Use ChatGPT

Teaching is about making the student love a subject so much, that the student WANTS to learn more. Most teachers, including myself, aren't good enough to invest most students with that level of love for the subject.

So, the students do pro forma work. Students who aren't really interested in a subject submit responses  generated by AIs like ChatGPT. They do that because they literally don't care about the subject, they just want to move on with their lives. It's the academic equivalent of saying, "Wow. That's very interesting. We should talk again about this. I have to go now." and then walking away.

In short, when students use ChatGPT, they are voting on the incompetence of the instructor. 

Instructors don't like being told they are incompetent. They especially don't like it when students point it out. And, to be fair to the instructors, it's not like they have a uniformly friendly audience. Most students are only in Class X to begin with for reasons that have nothing to do with the class. The class may be  a required general education course, or a prerequisite that the student isn't really interested in, or whatever. Most of the students walk in with the attitude that they were going to hate the class, and the instructor starts the first day at a substantial deficit. They can't figure out how to move the students out of that "hatred" auto-response. 

Instructors instinctively know that students cheat not just because the student may have inherent character defects (Lord knows many do), but also because instructors frequently suck at doing their jobs. So, the instructors strike back at the student by treating AI use as cheating, which actually doesn't make any sense.

When a student looks information up in a book, is that cheating? Socrates, an oral instructor, would have said "YES!" Plato, who wrote books about Socrates, may not have been so vociferous in agreeing. What Socrates considered a sign of a weak memory and a weak mind, i.e., the need to look things up in books, modern man calls "scholarship". But, as Socrates points out, books were the very first AI:

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.

By the start of the 21st century, and probably far sooner, the use of AI will be standard across all disciplines. AI use will be considered scholarship.

And the instructors who inveigh against it now will be looked on by future generations with gentle scorn.