Philosophy/ethics professor Troy Jollimore looks at the implications of a world where many students are submitting AI-generated essays. (“Sometimes they will provide quotations, giving page numbers that, as often as not, do not seem to correspond to anything in the actual world…”) Ideally if the students write the essays themselves, "some of them start to feel it. They begin to grasp that thinking well, and in an informed manner, really is different from thinking poorly and from a position of ignorance. That moment, when you start to understand the power of clear thinking, is crucial.

“The trouble with generative AI is that it short-circuits that process entirely.”

One begins to suspect that a great many students wanted this all along: to make it through college unaltered, unscathed. To be precisely the same person at graduation, and after, as they were on the first day they arrived on campus. As if the whole experience had never really happened at all. I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It’s not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by AI — papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading, or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course…

It’s other things too… The students who beg you to reconsider the zero you gave them in order not to lose their scholarship. (I want to say to them: Shouldn’t that scholarship be going to ChatGPT?â) It’s also, and especially, the students who look at you mystified. The use of AI already seems so natural to so many of them, so much an inevitability and an accepted feature of the educational landscape, that any prohibition strikes them as nonsensical. Don’t we instructors understand that today’s students will be able, will indeed be expected, to use AI when they enter the workforce? Writing is no longer something people will have to do in order to get a job.

Or so, at any rate, a number of them have told me. Which is why, they argue, forcing them to write in college makes no sense. That mystified look does not vanish — indeed, it sometimes intensifies — when I respond by saying: Look, even if that were true, you have to understand that I don’t equate education with job training.

What do you mean? they might then ask.

And I say: I’m not really concerned with your future job. I want to prepare you for life…

My students have been shaped by a culture that has long doubted the value of being able to think and write for oneself — and that is increasingly convinced of the power of a machine to do both for us. As a result, when it comes to writing their own papers, they simply disregard it. They look at instructors who levy such prohibitions as irritating anachronisms, relics of a bygone, pre-ChatGPT age… As I go on, I find that more of the time, energy, and resources I have for teaching are dedicated to dealing with this issue. I am doing less and less actual teaching, more and more policing. Sometimes I try to remember the last time I actually looked forward to walking into a classroom. It’s been a while.