It has become common for U.S. students to use AI to complete assignments or even ghostwrite entire papers, and many schools allow students to use AI tools within certain limits.
According to a report by The New York Times on the 17th local time, a growing number of experts worry that the problem may not simply be whether students can write, but that long-term reliance on AI could weaken their own thinking abilities.
Ronald T. Kellogg, a cognitive psychologist, told The New York Times that writing is a technology for thinking. He said drafting an ordinary paper places a burden on the brain much like digging a ditch tires the body. Writers must repeatedly search for precise words, organize scattered ideas into a structure others can understand, and continually refine their viewpoints through self-editing or feedback from others.
Writing, therefore, cannot be separated from the mental work involved in it. Once machines take over this process, students save more than just the time spent typing and choosing words; they also lose the training that should have been done by their own brains.
Writing is not merely a way to record ideas that have already taken shape. The writing process itself trains working memory, planning, and metacognition, or the ability to observe and understand one’s own thought processes.
Writing is often surrounded by romantic notions, but actually putting words on paper is an intensive form of mental labor. A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earlier this year also found that people who used AI to write papers showed lower brain activity than those who wrote entirely on their own. More notably, participants who used AI to complete their papers had difficulty recalling even a single sentence they had just written. Later, even when asked to write again without AI, their brain activity remained at a low level.
The New York Times noted that most people would not voluntarily choose to “dig a ditch,” and writing can likewise be daunting. Steve Graham, a writing researcher and educational psychologist at Arizona State University, cautioned that having AI do any part of the writing process comes at a cost.
The New York Times reporter Dana Goldstein consequently asked: If writing is thinking, then outsourcing any part of the struggle to technology means giving up some freedom to perceive and judge. If students let machines provide answers directly for them, how could they know what they truly think about anything?
Elementary, middle, high schools, and universities across the United States have begun reconsidering how to limit students’ use of AI. Some schools have returned to handwritten assignments and oral examinations, while others have banned first-year students from using digital devices in class. Ivy League schools such as Princeton University have even abandoned some long-standing honor-code practices, no longer allowing students to take quizzes and exams without supervision.
One somewhat positive sign is that many students have also begun to realize for themselves that using AI to ghostwrite analytical essays on assigned literary works amounts to voluntarily giving up part of the educational process.
A third-year university student told The New York Times: “If you don’t truly analyze these difficult texts, you can’t develop this ability. These texts are supposed to be difficult.”