While artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for a very long time, its recent boom in usage, both in industry and in the personal lives of everyday people, cannot be understated. With its ever-increasing presence, it has become far more important for students to understand where AI is having an impact, and how it will affect them going forward.
How AI impacts education
Within the college experience, AI is changing the educational field in ways that can be potentially helpful, and potentially dangerous. Professor Overono, a professor of cognitive psychology at UVU, had this to say: “you can easily go find published research that says, hey, we integrated chat bots in our classroom… and we ask students to do a Q and A with these chat bots, and we show that students who did that learned more… At the same time, there’s plenty of high-profile things that come out that say, hey… They [students] have wrote an essay with AI or not, and look at this, the ones who used AI remembered much less of that paper that they wrote.” As with many kinds of technology, caution is advised. What we can infer from these studies is that AI can be misused, but it can also provide benefits; what these drawbacks and advantages will be is currently up for debate.
While being interviewed, Dr. Overono mentioned an assignment in one of her courses, where students are required to come up with a research topic for a paper, and she allowed her students to use AI to help them. “I was noticing a lot of students at disclosures were like, oh, I showed the article to Chat GPT and asked for some ideas. I went, oh. Hold on. Yes, you’re disclosing, which is what I want… But that helped me realize on this assignment, the main thing I care about is you trying to come up with an idea. So now I rewrote that for the semester and said, hey, yes, you can use AI to help write, but I want that topic idea to really come from you.”
Dr. Overono then went on to discuss the idea of disequilibrium, a state of confusion and frustration that arises while a student learns a new concept. Overono stresses the importance of feeling discomfort while learning to recognize mistakes and adjust your patterns of thinking. This is something that AI does not promote; because AI is trained to keep its users comfortable, so that they’re motivated to return and keep using it. “It’s not gonna call you out and tell you you’re wrong… so you have to monitor your own thinking, your own metacognition, when you’re interacting with these types of tools.” The solution to this, according to Overono, is to look at multiple sources, and ask other people, as their insights might allow them to detect biases and false information that you or an AI might not catch.
The idea of misleading information also stems from AI’s inherent bias. AI is a machine, but it’s a machine trained on human-made data, which can cause AI to reflect flaws and potential inaccuracies as truth. Overono suggests that students could use Google’s teachable machine, a program that allows users to train programs with data sets to understand this for themselves. “Have it learn the difference between a smile and a frown. And so, most people, they’ll train it on themselves… and then you can turn on your webcam… and it’s probably gonna be pretty accurate for detecting your smile and frown. What happens when we do it with another person? If our data is only based on you, it’ll get really good at you, but it might have trouble generalizing. So I think that’s the ways we can talk about how data sets themselves carry value and carry bias.”
How AI impacts mental and cognitive health
In recent years, AI has also been subjected to multiple studies regarding its effects on the mental health and well-being of its users. When asked, Overono stated that many of her concerns with AI lie in the attachments people can develop with the chatbots, and the data sets these AIs are trained on. “If you’re talking to Chat GPT, we don’t know what it’s been trained on anymore. Open AI doesn’t tell us what data sets they train on anymore. They have not for a few releases. So vast amounts of text or other content are being put in here. And it’s making predictions about what to respond to you based on the input you’ve put and how it’s been trained.”
Because of how AI systems are trained, users can also program these chatbots with an artificial personality, like the personality of a deceased loved one. This is something that Overono has found especially concerning. “Companies that want to sell these to people would say, oh, this really would help with grief and trauma because you can still talk to your loved one. But what happens when that loved one starts to hallucinate things that didn’t happen or tells you awful things?” These kinds of interactions can be psychologically damaging to people who are already in a vulnerable state. “From what I understand from my colleagues who do work in areas related to loss and death and trauma you need that person to be gone, to begin moving on.” While this is a more extreme example of how AI can be used in a harmful way, it does demonstrate a need for caution and education as AI becomes further integrated in society.
How AI impacts the environment
In terms of environmental impact, artificial intelligence has dramatically increased energy consumption, CO2 emissions, electronic waste production and water consumption. These numbers have caused a great deal of concern within the scientific community, promoting studies and data collection that determine the long-term effects of AI.
According to MIT News, scientists estimated that the power requirements of data centers rose from 2,688 megawatts in 2022 to 5,341 megawatts in 2023. This was not solely caused by AI, as data centers existed long before AI exploded into the mainstream. However, this massive increase in power requirements was contributed to by AI’s rapid growth. The massive increase in energy consumption also made these data centers the 11th largest consumer of electricity on the planet (460 terawatt-hours), just behind the nation of France (463 terawatt-hours).
By 2026, scientists are estimating that the energy consumption of these data centers will increase to over a thousand terawatt-hours, which would make data centers the 5th largest energy consumer on the planet. On average, a single AI search uses about five times the amount of electricity as your average web search, making AI less environmentally sustainable than data centers that don’t support generative AI technology.
Additionally, AI data centers produce large amounts of electronic waste, containing toxic materials such as mercury and lead. This is caused by the large demand for electronic parts such as GPUs and RAM. In 2023 alone, the three major GPU producers on the planet, NVIDIA, Intel and AMD produced over 3.85 million GPUs, a sharp increase from 2022, where they produced around 2.67 million. This number is expected to increase year after year. As of January 2025, NVIDIA alone was set to ship over 6 million GPUs, though according to the company, their new generation GPUs are 40% more energy efficient than previous models.
Lastly, one of the primary concerns with AI and their data centers is their consumption of water. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water every day, which is the same amount of water consumed by a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people in a single year. This figure has increased with the introduction of generative AI into these data centers, causing the projected water and energy consumption to increase.
While these figures can appear staggering, some companies such as NVIDIA, have pledged to create more environmentally sustainable AI programs and the electronics needed to operate them, to reduce their carbon footprint in the world.
How AI impacts business
Like many other fields, AI has made a major impact on businesses and their practices. AI chatbots in customer service roles, for example, allow businesses to automate certain customer needs, decreasing the amount of people needed to operate call centers or customer service departments.
Additionally, AI has proven to be useful in finance, as AI models are capable of formulating large amounts of data faster than the average workforce. AI can also optimize supply chains, making them more efficient than human-run chains. These new features of AI have caused a myriad of short-term effects, some of which are positive, some of which are not.
One of these short-term effects is that businesses are opting to save money by laying off large swaths of their work forces, as AI automation allows them to accomplish the same tasks for a significantly reduced price. Seth Jenson, director of the Entrepreneurship Institute at UVU, informed the UVU Review that these effects are evident in the short term, and that the long-term results of this are still unclear.
Jenson, along with several experts outside of UVU, are looking towards a future with AI by designing and teaching an experimental course designed to familiarize students with AI usage and how AI usage might look by the year 2035. Jenson is both excited and hopeful to see what results the course could bring.
How AI impacts the arts
AI has also had a profound influence on many creative fields such as art and writing, as well as mainstream media such as film and television shows. One of the concerns stemming from this is whether AI generated art can even be considered art, as highlighted by Ilan Ben Meir, who published an article regarding AI art in College Contemporary. “AI may be able to produce “pretty” images that ‘we want to look at,’ as Kelly says, but that is not sufficient reason to construe these images as products of artistry, rather than, mechanism.”
These concerns, melded with the ethical dilemmas of AI generated works, have started movements pushing back against the use of AI in artwork. Just last year, at Salt Lake’s Comic Convention, or FanX, the selling of AI generated artwork was banned by the convention, and when UVU Review reporters asked the art vendors at the convention how they felt about it, many of them responded positively to the new rule.
While there are many detractors for the use of AI, there are some who believe that AI can be used positively. Nile Rogers, a legendary music producer, was optimistic regarding its use at a Davos music festival, “Any tool that allows an artist to create is an amazing thing.” Rogers did go on to say that he would never use AI as a way of imitating another artist.
One of the biggest concerns with AI generated work is the lack of compensation creatives receive for AI programs using their works. AI models, such as ChatGPT or MidJourney, are trained by viewing massive amounts of creative works of all types so that they can create the works requested by its users; and because of how new AI generated artwork and writing is, laws are not in place to ensure compensation to the creators of said works. This has in turn, caused a major ethical dilemma in regard to AI generated work, as the melding of different artwork and writing into a single image or piece of writing is not original work. This idea is reinforced through school policies, such as the ones instigated at our own UVU, that consider AI generated work to be a form of plagiarism.
Conclusion
AI is a form of technology, and technology, while having the ability to be very beneficial, can also be very harmful if misused. The data uncovered about AI so far suggests this pattern as well. Not everything is known about AI, and no matter how you choose to use it, it is essential to understand how it works before you do.
