Outsourcing schoolwork to ChatGPT: a threat to high school students' autonomy development?

Abstract

Education has the purpose of facilitating the autonomy development of students. Nonetheless, high school students use ChatGPT to outsource their schoolwork. Therefore, I investigate the effect of outsourcing schoolwork to ChatGPT on high school students’ autonomy development. High school students are in a key developmental stage of autonomy, which makes them an interesting group to investigate. Current philosophical papers mostly investigate higher education students or adult users, who can be assumed to have developed more advanced autonomy. This thesis offers a detailed analysis of the effects on autonomy development when students use ChatGPT for schoolwork. Specifically, the effects on deskilling, privacy, AI literacy, self-directed learning, manipulation, and the student’s perspectives are investigated. This is done by using an autonomy definition consisting of the rationality, optionality and independence condition, and by distinguishing between eight different ways of outsourcing. The analysis shows that all forms of outsourcing discussed can have both positive and negative effects on the student’s autonomy development. Adopting a critical attitude can shift the effects towards the positive side. Investing in the AI literacy of both students and teachers would therefore be an appropriate measure for high schools. While this conclusion has been drawn before, this thesis gives a detailed overview of what elements of autonomy can be affected by different ways of outsourcing, giving concrete guidance on what AI literacy should be focused on.