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