By Ganiu Bamgbose, PhD
It is worth reiterating that Artificial Intelligence has come to stay and the debate over whether or whether not to accept/adopt it is needless, fruitless and baseless. The discussion at the moment should be the survival of professions and professionals in the age of artificial intelligence. The prerequisite for the survival of occupations in the age of Artificial Intelligence is the adoption of AI in occupational operations. The fear and prediction of AI taking over the world is not manifesting completely so soon inasmuch as its creation and adoption still depend on human ingenuity.
Bill Gates has been reported to predict the survival of three works as AI takes over human roles but of course Gates too did not consider dynamics such as the unequal spread and uneven penetration of AI to different countries of the world. We are not all experiencing AI at the same level. This puts everyone at the liberty of studying the wave at their own spot and determining out to wage in to continually attract wages.
Artificial intelligence will replace only those who are not in place. By this I mean that the wave of AI will threaten only those who are not weaving AI into whatever they are doing already. With AI for instance, many teachers will no longer fit into the profession but teaching as a profession will not get easily swept away by AI. Teachers can subsume AI into their methodological approach but AI is not immediately prepared to incorporate the empathy and the affection that will come from a teacher to their students. The teacher that will not be replaced by AI must therefore know that the classroom in the 21st century is made up of CLICKS, and not just BRICKS. With the congested classrooms in many African countries, the AI-compliant teacher must achieve PACE even without SPACE.
Academics and researchers who also see AI as a free gift of nature that comes without fee will in no time fizzle out. In line with the thoughts of scholars and the editorial positions of many journals, Sumaya Laher differentiated between AI-assisted content and AI-generated content. AI-assisted content refers to work that is predominantly written by an individual but has been improved with the aid of AI tools. AI-generated content is produced by the AI itself. This could mean that the AI tool generates significant portions of text, or even entire sections, based on detailed instructions (prompts) provided by the author. Intellectual outputs that do not contain the ingenuity and voice of an academic or researcher amounts to plagiarism on the one hand and prepares such person for intellectual degradation on the other hand. It is ridiculous that the first move of an intellect when presented with a topic, issue or debate is to find out what AI says. A scholar should take the within-without approach to discourses which requires your intellection before AI-inclusion, and not the without-within approach which prompts you to essentially rely on AI-generated ideas before asking yourself if you have anything to add.
Academics should also note that they are dealing with a generation of students who are smarter than they are brilliant. They have not cultivated the use of their intellect so much but are fantastic at using AI. An AI-ignorant supervisor can therefore give good grades for completely AI-generated submissions because they are not aware of the affordance of artificial intelligence. While the gist is not to prevent or discourage the use of AI for school tasks, students must be guided on how to use the available online tools and, of course, be punished for misuse and abuse.
In conclusion, Artificial intelligence (AI) has been said to refer to “intelligent machines and algorithms that can reason and adapt based on sets of rules and environments which mimic human intelligence”. This makes clear that AI is not designed to replace human ingenuity so everyone who remains ingenious will remain relevant even in our AI-driven world. We are therefore left with the option of placing AI in the scheme of things if we will not be replaced by AI. Individuals must not wait for authorities to do it for them. Academics must not wait for their institutions to train them. We all must strive to move with the wave of AI as much as we can as failure plus explanation will not guarantee success.
(c) 2025 Ganiu Bamgbose writes from the Department of English, Lagos State University.
