When I graduated high school back in 2022, I didn’t anticipate that only four years later, my work would be held at the same value as work produced for my peers but created by artificial intelligence (AI). By the end of my first year of college, ChatGPT had been created, introduced and accepted with open arms by seemingly everyone at my university. My school, Northeastern University, has gone on to become one of the top institutions championing AI as a tool for progress by partnering with Claude, creating an AI major and proposing an AI coursework graduation requirement. My question is, after spending thousands of dollars on tuition, why are schools promoting the use of a tool that completely removes essential steps in the learning process?

Since its inception as a user friendly tool, AI has flashed across everyone’s screens as a translation device, content creator or fact checker. Because of the quick incorporation of AI into many platforms, using AI can happen without a second thought. It’s this ease that is changing the way people approach doing tasks and, in turn, how our brains are wired. 

In school, the stress students are under arises out of pressures from all aspects of their lives, most of which, cannot be alleviated with quick solutions. Homework can feel like the most trivial of all tasks, almost begging you to complete it with the help of AI when you can just copy and paste any assignment with a query and receive a passable answer. Busy work needn’t be busy anymore, and naturally, students are taking advantage of that. The long-term effects of the constant use of AI haven’t yet been measured, since we are only in the beginning stages of what will, no doubt, be the start of our new future, but glimpses of new behavior patterns have begun to catch my eye.

As an English major, my classes practically negate the use of AI by relying solely on opinion-based discussions. Assignments are typically essays or discussion posts: where you write out your argument as to why you think a certain thing. Using AI for any part of this process actually degrades the quality of your work because writing is linked with thinking. Removing a step in the thinking process, such as ideation or organization, shatters the heart of the work by inserting a layer between oneself and one’s work. The key is that there is no right answer, there’s only your answer: one AI can’t create. 

Only this past year have I begun to see professors including AI policies on their syllabi––saying that they understand the pervasive nature of AI and thus accept, yet require students to let them know when, and what they use it for. I first interacted with this policy in an online asynchronous class in which the only instruction was through peer review despite most of the work of my peers was blatantly written by AI. While I also didn’t particularly care or want to devote much time to this class, the fact that their work was acceptable as their work to our professor, rendered my participation in the class as obsolete. 

This blind acceptance of the use of AI in written course work entirely diminishes the value in completing the work. The process of writing, be it strenuous or effortless, forces you to reflect and critically think. By taking the time to work through different ways of expressing oneself, students can gain a firmer grasp on their identity along with a host of other lifelong skills. As a senior about to graduate, watching underclassmen use Claude as their notetaking platform to summarize on demand or as a launching point for assignments tells me all I need to know about how second nature it has become. Why write queries without context when you can take all your notes in the chat bot so that when the time comes, it can do the thinking for you? 

Without making a proper pivot towards learning with the help of AI instead of through it, overly accepting AI policies are going to continue to degrade the quality of education in our younger generations. Even now, not using AI to complete assignments is outlandish to many college students, effectively making AI the newest kid in school. It is my desperate hope to high school students and current college students to please not let AI take your learning away from you. To learn, is to live, and the goal of college is to enrichment your life. You can choose enrichment over efficiency, all it takes is investing in yourself to make it happen.