AI Robs My Students of the Ability to Think

They report that they find their ability to write, speak and conduct basic inquiry is slipping away.

Excerpt: "One of the things I love about teaching political communications is my students’ eagerness to take up the art and craft of the work at hand. Shame seldom cast its shadow on our classroom conversations. Last year that changed.

More than half the nonnative English-speaking students and a notable number of native English speakers told me that after relying on AI to draft their papers and emails, their ability to write, speak and conduct basic inquiry is slipping away. They tell me this as if they have done something wrong, never considering that it is their professors, not they, who should carry that burden.

I am no stranger to the effect of technology on language and literacy, nor am I shocked by its bland patterns of enthusiastic advent, which always give way to shabbiness and decay. Google promised the ability to search—a word that has terrific depth and meaning—and delivered a crass advertiser-led sorting system. Facebook started as proto-Tinder before a revamp that said we’d get Woodstock-style digital communes. Then it locked us in a space where people scream at each other.

Through it all, I have tinkered with, embraced, studied, used, thrown away and taught about more forms of technology than I can remember, from letterpress printing to podcast production. But no new technology has produced such a terrifying admission of stark and fundamental disempowerment by my students as AI has.

For all its promise, AI is being developed and used in ways that are disabling."