ChatGPT currently serves about 400 million people weekly, but that number will probably drop once schools let out for the summer because nearly 90% of students have reportedly admitted – in more than one survey – that they use chatbots to help with their schoolwork. These AI-powered bots can check grammar, write outlines, help with research, and summarize text, among other things. Many rely on them to write 80% or more of their papers. Ethical issues abound, of course, and cheating defeats the purpose of attending school, though nowadays it seems young adults go to college only in hopes of landing a decent job. They want a diploma, not knowledge. Most universities are probably fine with that since they get their money either way. But teachers seem to be fighting a losing battle. In the long run, though, students falling back on AI might suffer the most, except they probably won’t even realize it.
AI Dependence
A couple of months after ChatGPT was introduced to the public in 2023, “a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used [a] chatbot to help with homework assignments,” explained New York magazine. “Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human.”
Students at universities and higher-ed schools across the globe are depending on AI to skate through “every facet of their education,” explained New York. Generative-AI chatbots – such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot – “take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays.”
In 2024, the Digital Education Council, “a global community of practice for education innovation,” surveyed nearly 4,000 students across 16 countries, and 86% of them said they used artificial intelligence in their studies. Then, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), a think tank in the UK, published its latest findings in February. In a survey of more than 1,000 full-time undergraduates, 92% admitted to using some form of AI, nearly 30% higher than in 2024.
One teacher told New York the situation was a “full-blown existential crisis.” Sam Williams, a former teaching assistant at the University of Iowa, estimated in November that “at least half his students were using AI to write their papers.” The professor told him to grade the assignments as if they were a “true attempt at a paper” because it was a “slippery slope” trying to prove students were using AI. Williams, disappointed with the situation, dropped out of graduate school at the end of the semester.
In another conversation, a freshman at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, told the magazine she spends “hours and hours” on TikTok – “until my eyes start hurting” – making it difficult to find time for schoolwork. With ChatGPT, she can whip up an essay in a couple of hours instead of spending half a day writing one from scratch. She’s not alone. It’s rare not to see ChatGPT on her peers’ laptops during classes, she said. Some students nearly brag about it online, too. One in Utah posted a video on social media showing her copying and pasting a chapter from a textbook into ChatGPT, with the caption “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point.”
It’ll probably get worse before it gets better – if that’s even possible. ChatGPT’s developer markets to college kids and recently allowed students to use ChatGPT Plus for free during finals.
‘It Changes Everything’
Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University released a study in which they surveyed more than 300 knowledge workers to examine how and when they use AI to determine its influence on their ability to think critically, specifically their own perception of it. Lo and behold, the more the workers turned to AI, the less critical thinking they employed. They instead focused more on “information verification, response integration and task stewardship.”
Another study, this one by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School in the UK, found that “increased reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) tools is linked to diminished critical thinking abilities,” explained Phys.org, a website dedicated to science. “It points to cognitive offloading as a primary driver of the decline.”
That seems counterproductive to learning. What can teachers do? It’s difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that students are using chatbots to cheat, but the technology’s threat to critical thinking doesn’t apply only to students cutting corners or cheating to pass classes. Many people lean on AI for task efficiency, such as summarizing and editing emails, which still endangers cognitive development. Worse, artificial intelligence has seeped into our daily lives and is now integrated with phones and browsers. Heck, there are more chatbots online than people. It seems every time you turn around, artificial intelligence pops up somewhere new, as if Big Tech were beating us over the head with it, refusing to stop until we accept the terms, let go, and stop thinking for ourselves. But the more often people hand off cognitive duties to AI, the more likely they are to reduce their ability to think critically, retain memories, and solve problems.
“Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological,” said the late Neil Postman in his 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Just like when you remove “caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.” Seeing how Generative AI will likely eclipse traditional browsers soon and change how we use the internet and consume information, Postman’s metaphor seems apt.
AI chatbots will probably remake society and culture regardless of what people do, but how much it alters us as human beings depends on how much we’re willing to give up for convenience and ease. The young adults making that tradeoff in academia could be engaging in a Faustian bargain. Soon the urge to do less work will turn into the desire to do as little as possible – until the desire dies and thinking becomes a lost art.
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