An AI Commonplace Part I: Diagnosing the Problem

“[W]hen we let a computer think for us, we put a gun to the head of civilisation.” - Katherine Rundell

Here are a few links to, and quotations from, articles and essays I’ve found helpful as I prepare to attempt yet again to persuade my students not to use AI in their assignments, and to explain to friends and colleagues inside and outside academia why AI is such a threat. 

It’s one thing to use AI when you are over 40 and know how to think for yourself, quite another when your job is to teach students how to think:

“A formed mind can argue or wrangle with the machine, reject its false polish and recognize when the language it constructs to redescribe the world has become too smooth or soulless. Someone who has lived with words long enough can sense when a sentence has not been earned, and someone who has already developed a voice can use the machine without allowing the machine to become the voice. … We do not wait for children to turn 16 to hand them car keys because cars are evil, and we do not insist that surgeons train for years because scalpels are immoral. We build thresholds around powerful things because power requires judgment, and judgment can’t be downloaded or installed. Before a person asks a machine to write for her, she should know what it feels like to write from the depths of her own uncertainty and identity. Before a person lets a machine imitate her voice, she should have endured the long, uneven, often humiliating process of acquiring one.” - Debbie Millman in the NYTimes

I’m no Luddite, but I’m here to tell you that when it comes to education in the Humanities, there is no upside to Artificial Intelligence:

• “The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care.” - Bret Stephens in the NYTimes
• “AI … risks becoming an iron curtain that comes down between a young person and their potential for thinking, for experiment and conquering frustration, for stamina and for invention – and thereby, between the young people and their freedom. It risks halting learning before it can take flight. Studies show, over and over, that when we engage in AI-assisted learning we give up sooner. … We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible.” - Katherine Rundell in the Guardian (read the whole thing)
• “It might be ‘cool’ or ‘innovative’ to teach students to summarize readings with ChatGPT or write essays with Claude. But we may be doing them a disservice: reducing their ability to retain material, think creatively, and reason from what they know. If you only read what AI has summarized for you, you don’t truly ‘know’ the material.” - Sally Sharif

There is a reason why the law school at University of California (Berkeley) has adopted a default policy that bans most uses of AI, that the University of Toronto’s law school is moving to make some courses “laptop free,” and that the University of Chicago has banned “technology in class and AI assistance on coursework” in all of its sociology core courses.

Unfortunately, simply banning AI is not enough. ChatGPT was released in November 2022, when most incoming college and university students were in grade 9. Many if not most first-year students will have used AI throughout high school. The technology is now everywhere and hard to resist:

• “In the first couple years of generative AI, many of us assumed that if we offered students good ways of using these tools, they would adopt those and forgo the lazy ones. Recent studies suggest that many students do neither. Instead, research has confirmed our worries and named them — cognitive offloading, cognitive debt, cognitive surrender, automation bias, illusion of competence, moral disengagement — a menagerie of threats we haven’t been able to protect our students from, or convince them to protect themselves from. If anything, our original concerns were understated.” - Clay Sharky, “AI Is a ‘Wicked Problem’”
• Students are under “enormous pressure to use AI or fall behind those who are.” “They used AI because it was there, because their classmates use it, because they fear if they don’t use it they’ll fall behind, because some professors ask them to and some tell them not to and some look away and some can’t see it when it’s literally right in front of them.” - Jeff Sharlet, “My Students Hate AI. But They Can’t Stop Using It.”
• “[W]e can no longer guarantee that the work students give us is the product of their own minds. Friends at universities around the UK optimistically tell me that they can tell when their students are handing in AI-generated work. But I think we can’t, not from written work alone; for myself, I’m only sure that I can tell when a young person is using AI badly.”” - Katherine Rundell
• “[T]he only reliable pattern I see is this: Whatever evidence faculty learn to trust as proof that a student did the work, a product appears to counterfeit it.” - Susan E. Ray, “The Next Wave of AI-Cheating Technology”

There is a reason why faculty members are demoralized, grieving, and retiring early.

So much for the problem. I outline possible responses here.

For earlier posts about AI, see:

• On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores (13 April 2025) 
• More on AI, Student Learning and Human Flourishing (29 June 2025) 
• An AI-Free Zone (1 Sept 2025)