AI Making Students Stupid

Students across the country are using AI models to complete assignments and write entire essays. Some of this constitutes cheating, but in many cases schools are allowing students to make some use of AI tools. This is a slippery slop. As some experts argue, any intrusion of automation into the writing process isn’t just threatening students’ composition skills, but their entire ability to think. “Writing is a technology for thinking,” cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg told the New York Times in a new essay mulling the consequences of sidestepping the hard work of writing. Writing, the piece notes, helps develop all sorts of cognitive faculties, including building our working memory, executive planning skills, and our metacognition, or the ability to be aware of your own thinking. For all the romanticism around writing, it’s also a form of drudgery. Kellogg says that drafting a basic essay is as mentally taxing as digging a ditch is physically exhausting. You have to really rack your brain to find the right word and organize ideas in a way that makes sense to a broader audience. When they’re manifested in the real world, you revise your ideas by going over them yourself or asking for feedback.