An AI Commonplace Part II: Possible Responses

“If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history. ... Most of all, ... you would love the way that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini have thrown a grenade into thousands of years of teaching and learning: the way they threaten to upend our ability to think with the robust clarity that is needed in emergencies of justice. - Katherine Rundell

In a previous post, I outlined the threat AI poses to education and learning in the Humanities. Here, I describe possible responses:

A non-starter for me is requiring students to use and evaluate AI in class. The best way to build AI-literacy is to learn to think without it. (See this 10 July 2026 column by Scott Carlson in CHE.)

(1)  Persuasion: First, then, we can and should try to persuade students to learn for their own sake. Good examples include:

• Katherine Rundell (again): “I tell the students I meet: imagine you’re an Olympic athlete. You set out to sprint the 3km across London, from Clapham to Balham. You know if you take the bus, it will be faster. But you also know that the point was never being in Clapham or Balham; they’re very similar: they both have a nice Pizza Express. It was the strength you built, the speed and knowledge of your body that you gained. A student’s essay on Macbeth has no value as a product. It’s what you learned in the reading and writing that created it – the swiftness and resilience and suppleness of thinking you built, along with the knowledge gained of a literary marvel, of something quicksilver and unsummarisable – that was the point. So you can’t collaborate with AI in the same way you can’t collaborate with a bus. And you cannot learn to think without a climbing frame of facts and ideas and texts to move around in.”  
• Jennifer Frey: “What I remind them of, in very clear terms, is that if they outsource their thinking, they’re simply outsourcing their own humanity.”
• From a more theological perspective, Russell Moore writes: “[T]echnology will make it easier and easier for you to stop thinking, to stop paying attention, to stop the renewal of your mind. Part of what it means to love is to conserve your ability to think, feel, and create. That requires paying attention to where the present age is attempting to pull you, and to map out another, harder way. Your brain does not belong to you. It was bought with a price. Guard that trust.” (See also Jordan Daniel Wood’s theological ‘mini-manifesto.’)

Last year I hoped to be able to get by with persuasion:

“Instead of totally changing the way I teach—and in the process abandoning effective ways of helping students learn—I will try once more to persuade my students that turning to AI to complete assignments in my courses will only hurt themselves.

That attempt failed, at least in my first and second year classes. Although my role was not primarily “to police the boundaries,” my zero-tolerance policy, among other things, resulted in enough unpleasant conversations with students already skilled in the arts of AI for me to resolve to change my approach in required entry-level classes.

(2) A Total Institutional Ban: Perhaps because he is now a journalist rather than a faculty member, Tyler Austin Harper, with the luxury of idealism, calls for a total institutional ban on artificial intelligence:

“All institutions of higher education in the United States should be animated by the same basic question: What are the most effective things—even if they sound extreme—that we can do to limit, and ideally abolish, the unauthorized use of AI on campus? Once the schools have an answer, their leaders should do everything in their power to make these things happen. ... They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution [including Wi-Fi, smartphones, and laptops]. … Taking drastic measures against AI in higher education is not about embracing Luddism, which is generally a losing proposition. It is about creating the conditions necessary for young people to learn to read, write, and think, which is to say, the conditions necessary for modern civilization to continue to reproduce itself. Institutions of higher learning can abandon their centuries-long educational project. Or they can resist.” - Tyler Austin Harper, “The Question All Colleges Should Ask Themselves About AI”

Or maybe Harper simply has a clear-eyed view of the extent of the problem. 

(3) A Flipped Classroom: Since a total institutional tech ban is beyond my reach, I intend to combine a total classroom tech ban with a flipped class model in my first and second-year courses. Following the lead of many others (see here, here, here, here, and especially here), introductory students will write all assignments by hand in class. 

To be sure, important things are lost in this approach—that is where the grieving comes in—but persuasion is not enough:

“Telling classroom instructors they can have 2022 back, just as long as we implement some new technology, or produce some new syllabus statement, or regale our adoring and compliant students with the “forklift at the gym” metaphor just one more time, is selling them an attractive lie.” - Clay Sharky 

 Blame AI.

If, on the other hand, this change leads to better student engagement in our present moment, something important will be gained.

How will this work? I don’t know. I am not teaching any introductory Biblical Studies courses this semester, so I can postpone decisions on course design for a couple more months. And I haven’t decided how to adjust larger 300-level courses open to all majors (another 2nd semester question).

Dealing with AI is, as Clay Sharky puts it, a “wicked problem” that will take time to solve:

“Faculty do not need to become experts in AI, but they do need to develop opinions about AI informed by their own areas of expertise, and they need to spell it out in the syllabus. We are the ones who have to do this work. ... [N]ow is not the time for purity in our approach. It is not critical that we develop a unified strategy. .... Now is the time for trying something and its opposite at the same time, then talking about what works and what doesn’t.” - Clay Sharky, “AI Is a ‘Wicked Problem.’”

Prayer appreciated. 

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) 
• An AI Commonplace Part I: Diagnosing the Problem (30 August 2026) 

 

 

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) 

 

An AI-Free Zone

 

When my students log-in to their course LMS this semester, they will encounter this warning:

This course is an AI-Free Zone: Because I am interested in what you think and in your own learning—including learning to communicate effectively in writing—the use of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grammarly Pro, etc., is strictly forbidden in this class.

All written assignments for this course must be your own work presented in your own words.

Students must be able to talk cogently about their written assignments and their research process. At the professor’s discretion, an oral interview may be required before a grade is assigned for any assignment. Failure to participate in the interview process will result in a 0 on the assignment.

(For good measure, the same statement appears on my syllabi.)

I am not, I think, naïve. I don’t imagine perfect compliance or that I will even be able to tell each time AI is used. I am also aware that this is not a structural change to course assessment: Rather than materially altering my assignments, I am relying on students to choose to follow my class rules instead of turning to the low-hanging fruit that is ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and other Large Language Models that masquerade as “artificial intelligence.”

But here’s the thing: AI-bots are very good at producing the kind of introductory thinking-piece essay that teachers have used for generations. The point in these kinds of assignments is not for students to make a new contribution to knowledge, but to learn as they think through classic intellectual problems on their own. These assignments have been used for so long because they work—or they did work until AI-bots came along. All of a sudden we have to look for alternatives to traditional but effective ways of helping students learn (including summarizing, analyzing, synthesizing, etc.). We may eventually come up with workarounds as good or better than our current approaches to teaching, but we aren’t there yet.

So instead of totally changing the way I teach—and in the process abandoning effective ways of helping students learn—I will try once more to persuade my students that turning to AI to complete assignments in my courses will only hurt themselves.

Here is one more reason why:

With great texts, the reading is its own reward. No potted summary of Plato’s Republic or Homer’s Odyssey will substitute for the real thing. These rich texts can’t be absorbed on a single reading; give them years of attention and they will still have more to say. As a teacher in the Humanities, a major part of my job is helping students learn to read. This includes reading and thinking about difficult texts. Again, it is the struggle that matters for learning and thinking. And so a Cole's notes version or an AI summary will not help students learn how to summarize or synthesize, and it will not get the texts inside them in a way that shapes their lives.

What is true about Plato's Republic is even more true about the Bible, a collection of texts whose meaning and implications cannot be exhausted. As a Christian educator, one of my primary aims is to help people connect with the text of Scripture. The point is not so much the right answer or correct prose, but getting the text inside you deep enough that it can do its inspired work.

Thankfully, in my confessional setting students tend to be open to this kind of argument. Some will continue to cheat themselves (and their professor). My role is not primarily to police the boundaries, but to try and create conditions that will motivate and enhance learning. Wish me luck.

Earlier posts on Education and AI:

• On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores
• More on AI, Student Learning and Human Flourishing
  

More on AI, Student Learning and Human Flourishing

One of the great things about last semester’s sabbatical is that I didn’t have to think about making my assignments harder to outsource to AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT. I did start collecting what others have to say about how Generative AI harms student learning.

Matteo Wong, writing for The Atlantic, puts it well:

A car that accelerates instead of braking every once in a while is not ready for the road. A faucet that occasionally spits out boiling water instead of cold does not belong in your home. Working properly most of the time simply isn’t good enough for technologies that people are heavily reliant upon. And two and a half years after the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI is becoming such a technology. ... Generative AI is a technology that works well enough for users to become dependent, but not consistently enough to be truly dependable. ... For now, the technology’s flaws are readily detected and corrected. But as people become more and more accustomed to AI in their life—at school, at work, at home—they may cease to notice. Already, a growing body of research correlates persistent use of AI with a drop in critical thinking; humans become reliant on AI and unwilling, perhaps unable, to verify its work.  

Alan Jacobs, from whom I got several of these links, agrees:

“Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything.”

The problem, according to Jacobs, is that in today’s universities, “the acquisition of knowledge” competes with the desire for a good job and the desire for a good time. Students turn to AI because they value the “university experience” and the diploma more than education.

According to Jonathan Malesic, Generative AI apps, such as ChatGPT, are gimmicks that falsely promise a shortcut in place of the hard work that true teaching and learning requires:

“I have found, to overcome students’ resistance to learning, you often have to trick them. There’s the old bait-and-switch of offering grades, then seeing a few students learn to love learning itself. Worksheets are tricks, as are small-group discussions and even a teacher’s charisma. … I don’t know anyone for whom it’s a straightforward task. It’s the challenge for any teacher, and AI offers a tempting illusion to students—and evidently to some teachers—that there could be a shortcut. ... Part of a teacher’s job—certainly in the humanities, but even in professional fields like business—is to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds. ... I will sacrifice some length of my days to add depth to another person’s experience of the rest of theirs. ... The work is slow. Its results often go unseen for years. But it is no gimmick.”  

More than a gimmick, GenAI tools and the companies that produce them are actively hostile to learning:

Josh Eyler as quoted in CHE: “Learning is very hard work. It’s a deeply complex process …. If you offload onto AI the very cognitively demanding aspects of the learning process, then like a muscle atrophying, you’re weakening that process over time.” 

Joss Fong as quoted in CHE: “Education researchers have this term ‘desirable difficulties,’ which describes this kind of effortful participation that really works but also kind of hurts. And the risk with AI is that we might not preserve that effort, especially because we already tend to misinterpret a little bit of struggling as a signal that we’re not learning.” 

Lucas Ropek in “Multiple Studies Now Suggest That AI Will Make Us Morons”: “[T]he conclusion that using an app to complete a homework assignment makes you less capable of thinking for yourself would appear to be self-evident. Outsourcing mental duties to a software program means you’re not performing those duties yourself, and, as is pretty well established, doing something yourself is often the best way to learn.” 

James D. Walsh in New York Magazine: “It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants.”

And, in the best thing I’ve read on the topic, Megan Fritts writes:

“[T]he work that we bypass when using a calculator is less important than what we bypass when using an AI language generator for writing. To be a human self, a human agent, is to be a linguistic animal. … [T]o learn to use language just is to learn how to think and move about in the world. When we stop doing this—when our needs for communication are met by something outside of us, a detached mouthpiece to summon, describe and regale—the intimate connection between thought and language disappears. It is not only the capacity for speech that we will slowly begin to lose under such conditions, but our entire inward lives. ... [T]he real threat AI poses is not one of job replacement or grading frustration or having to reimagine assignments but something entirely different. ... [L]anguage-generating AI, whether it is utilized to write emails or dissertations, stands as an enemy to the human form of life by coming between the individual and her words. ... Preserving art, literature and philosophy will require no less than the creation of an environment totally and uncompromisingly committed to abolishing the linguistic alienation created by AI, and reintroducing students to the indispensability of their own voice.”

In sum, indiscriminate use of Generative AI—as encouraged by the likes of Microsoft, Google and OpenAI—is inimical to learning and antithetical to human flourishing.

For my earlier reflections on Gen AI and education, see On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores.