By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project
We are past halfway through our autumn semester and the pressure is real. Students are confronted with multiple projects overlapping in various classes. Due dates loom. Add extra stress if fun opportunities are scheduled at the end of October. Most will rise to the occasion, push hard, and finish the tasks. Some students won’t…but will at least learn about how to manage their time a bit better. Realizing young that it takes more than an hour to write an excellent essay is some small benefit. Some students simply can’t. They let AI become their master without even thinking about it.
For as long as teachers have taught students, there have been the first two groups. Given enough opportunity to mature executive function, those two groups usually merge, and everyone turns out just fine. It is only within the last few years that educators face the students who simply can’t. We aren’t talking about students who struggle with mental or physical health challenges. We are talking about students who gradually but surely handed over the bulk of their academic development to a handy “homework finisher” that enticingly came preinstalled on the very device where they finish their homework.
If you want to become physically fit, you don’t use a forklift to lift the weights for you. Repositioning weights is not the goal. By personally lifting incrementally heavier weights, you build a body that is ready for more extreme challenges as the years go by. The real work is in you, not the weights.
Trouble starts with the casual habit of asking ChatGPT a question about the weather, history, or movie trivia: easy, fast, common, everyone does it! When the question is academic, the brain makes no distinction. Have a question? Just ask!
Week 1 homework means no fast obvious answers but a comfortable challenge level. Your educators start with light weights for the first mental lift. If you habitually do “your” thinking through AI, even these tasks will feel challenging. Not too long ago, people would browse a few websites, evaluate which answers were more trustworthy, and then draw conclusions. This activity replaced checking a dictionary or textual resource. Now we type in a question and voila! A confident and even definitive response pops up. This answer even has bullet points if we hit the “more” button. No need for further analysis. This “looks” trustworthy.
It took one minute to ask AI for the perfect answer, and it saved the student 20 minutes of mental effort. What a bargain! Maybe the student doesn’t even think of this as “using” AI per se as this is already a well-worn habit. They just handed over their intellectual future to the handy, helpful, and wide awake AI of their choice.
Compared to peers who put in the full 20-minute mental struggle to answer assigned questions at the beginning of the semester, the AI student has given himself a handicap that becomes more dangerous with every use. Peers who started with a relatively easy load, are now lifting 20-pound weights while the AI student has lifted nothing whatsoever. As the semester continues, peers are lifting 30, then 40, then 50 pounds. The AI student can’t do any of that. Classmates are becoming mentally fit at an accelerated rate while AI students develop nothing. The AI student advances grade-level because answers are technically correct but now in 12th grade, his skills are no better than 7th or 8th grade. College is about to be a massively expensive disaster.
Thomas Carlyle would surely agree, “AI is the best of servants; but what a master!” Not using AI for your Lukeion classes is just the beginning. Try forcing yourself through the mental exercise of finding your answers to daily questions without constantly using that handy little helper. If you are already guilty of lifting too few mental loads, start again with easy weight demands. Start using old-timey things like resource materials or a library to rebuild your puny intellect. Your peers are well exercised and ready to keep moving forward. You may need to start again.
