What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?
July 08, 2025 at 01:48AMIf you read my recent picks at 404 Media and Intelligencer on how AI tools like ChatGPT are radically changing the higher education experience, you may be interested in this piece. Hsu, an instructor at a small liberal arts college, captures the same sense of despair and helplessness expressed by other educators, while also acknowledging that today’s college students are essentially guinea pigs—growing up in an era when technology has moved so much faster than we can adapt, and in a highly optimized, transactional society that has expected them to move through life in a very specific way. In response, we’re shaping generations of young adults who outsource their thinking. “It’s cheating, but I don’t think it’s, like, cheating,” one student tells Hsu when speaking about his friend using AI to write an art-history essay. “He was just fulfilling requirements, not training to become a literary scholar.”
Hsu asks important questions: “What is worth preserving, and what do we feel comfortable off-loading in the name of efficiency? . . . Could A.I. be here not to destroy education but to revolutionize it?” While there are no easy answers, Hsu’s observations deepen the larger conversation about the future of education.
In my conversations, just as college students invariably thought of ChatGPT as merely another tool, people older than forty focussed on its effects, drawing a comparison to G.P.S. and the erosion of our relationship to space. The London cabdrivers rigorously trained in “the knowledge” famously developed abnormally large posterior hippocampi, the part of the brain crucial for long-term memory and spatial awareness. And yet, in the end, most people would probably rather have swifter travel than sharper memories. What is worth preserving, and what do we feel comfortable off-loading in the name of efficiency?
Education, particularly in the humanities, rests on a belief that, alongside the practical things students might retain, some arcane idea mentioned in passing might take root in their mind, blossoming years in the future. A.I. allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human. I often tell my students that this is the last time in their lives that someone will have to read something they write, so they might as well tell me what they actually think.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/07/ai-college-writing/
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