It feels like we’ve reached a critical mass of consensus: AI is just bad for our students. The American Association of Colleges and Universities just released the results of a national survey of U.S. faculty, which found that 95 percent believed AI would “increase students’ overreliance” on such AI tools, and 90 percent believed AI would “diminish students’ critical thinking skills.” This is mirrored in a recent Brookings report, which concluded that “the risks of utilizing AI in education overshadow its benefits.” As one professor (“I’m an AI power user”) put it, “I want to strip things back: no laptops, no phones, just pens and paper.”
It seems everyone wants to find a way to minimize or even forbid AI use, kind of like how cell phone bans and restrictions in K–12 schools have passed in 33 states. The consequences of doing nothing, such narratives proclaim, could be dire. The Brookings report, for example, throws around terms such as cognitive decline, cognitive impairment, and cognitive atrophy—all of which, it notes, are associated with an “unhealthy aging brain.” They quote an MIT brain imaging study that suggests the long-term consequences of AI use may include “diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation, decreased creativity…[and] risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives.”
Here’s the problem with all this “Chicken Little” hysteria. Four years ago, before any of us had a clue about weird acronyms such as GPT, LLM, or AGI, every education expert I know was bemoaning students’ continued lack of academic competence. NAEP has for decades documented how just a small percentage of U.S. students reach even a “proficient” level in their reading and writing and that, compared to other countries, U.S. students consistently are middle-of-the-pack. Results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment incited two prominent scholars to conclude that college students were “academically adrift” and learning almost nothing across their years in college.
AI, in other words, did not erode critical thinking; it exposed how poorly we have been teaching it.
Let me be blunt: There was no golden age of critical thinking or academic achievement before AI came along and seemingly ruined everything. In the years before ChatGPT arrived, K–12 educators said some of their most pressing concerns were that schools were boring and that we didn’t know how to talk to each other; college leaders worried that they lacked the ability to strengthen students’ critical thinking, communication, or problem-solving skills to successfully enter the workforce.
So, sure, I understand today’s basic argument: Maybe using AI in the wrong way will make all this even worse. Trust me, I’ve been there. I was ready to give up and walk away as I saw AI supercharge a disengagement spiral that turned my college classroom into a transactional mirage of learning.
