Now, as college students of the ChatGPT-assisted cohort start graduating and entering the workforce, we are presented with a new subset of people — the AI natives.
According to IBM, an AI native is “something — usually a product, company or workflow — that was designed from the ground up with AI as a core component, not bolted on later as a mere feature.”
Of course, in the case of these students it means they themselves have been closely intertwined with AI for the majority, if not all, of their college education. This raises the question: what happens now, as they enter the workforce having offloaded some of their coursework to AI?
Some AI natives are regretting their choice to rely so heavily on AI throughout college and now feel they have to pay the price.
The rise of AI guilt
For students who engaged in some level of AI-enabled cheating to get through college, it’s providing a mental block now as guilt over AI usage becomes more prevalent. Design magazine Domus recently traced “AI guilt” through Reddit and found an abundance of posts, many from students, discussing the guilt they felt for using AI to complete work. Domus conceptualizes AI guilt as another form of imposter syndrome, which is “the belief that one’s successes are not fully legitimate if they result from outside help.”
All it takes is a quick Reddit search to find many posts admitting AI guilt. One post from five months ago on r/academia reads “I gave over to use AI. Now I cannot escape the guilt.”
The user explains that they had been against generative AI, but when it came to writing their Master’s thesis they found themself using AI to help rewrite their own ideas and findings “in a more coherent, elegant way.” The user said they used AI to help them get their thesis done as they were busy with deadlines and working two part-time jobs. But in the end, they said, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this bad and guilty over anything else in my entire 20-something years of life.”
Will using AI in college come back to bite you?
Aside from personal feelings of guilt, will using AI so heavily for college coursework come back to bite these AI natives as they try to enter the workforce?
