Students Are Skipping the Hardest Part of Growing Up (AI crutch)
Back in 2023 when ChatGPT was still new, a professor friend had a colleague observe her class. Afterward, he complimented her on her teaching, but asked if she knew her students were typing her questions into ChatGPT and reading its output aloud as their replies.
At the time, I chalked this up to cognitive offloading, the use of A.I. to reduce the amount of thinking required to complete a task. Looking back, though, I think it was an early case of emotional offloading, the use of A.I. to reduce the energy required to navigate human interaction.
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In the classroom, the domain I know best, some students are not just using the tools to reduce effort on homework, but also to avoid the stress of an unscripted conversation with a professor — the possibility of making a mistake, drawing a blank or looking dumb — even when their interactions are not graded.
Last fall, The Times reported on students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who cheated in their course, then wrote their apologies using A.I. In a situation where unforged communication to their professors might have made a difference, they still wouldn’t (or couldn’t) forgo A.I. as a social prosthetic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/opinion/ai-social-skills-relationships.html?
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This is why I forbid any technology in my classroom.
And, I'm moving to blue-book exams.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Some thoughts.....
First, I understand the concern over the dependence on AI in a classroom scenario, but AI as a technology is not going away.
Secondly, I personally have found AI to be a useful and efficient tool for obtaining information, evaluating ideas, and enhancing creativity in my routine day to day life for tasks such as grammar and phrasing checks on my emails and journal entries, doing quick research on an item that I read about in a news story, etc.
And finally, although I understand the desire to limit its use in the classroom, I personally believe that in a broader generic sense, it is simply a digital age tool that won't diminish our intelligence any more than calculators lessen our understanding of mathematics.
