One of my few moments of real academic pride in college came during a class I had taken on Shakespeare. It happened because I was accused of cheating on an assignment.
The professor had assigned a paper on a play of our choosing, I think the assignment was 10 pages which at the time seemed like a lot. I chose to write about my favorite comedy, Twelfth Night. As I read over the play again I noticed something about my favorite character in the play, Feste the fool. It wasn't anything earthshaking, I just noticed that over and over he was talking about money. And once I noticed I decided to make that the subject of my paper and I basically just counted and catalogued how fixated Feste seemed to be on money.
I turned the paper in and a few days later the professor called me into his office. I don't remember what I was thinking at that point but I was definitely surprised when, after discussing my paper for a couple of minutes, he suggested that I hadn't really written it myself. I guess he'd been angling to find out where I got the idea or maybe where I'd copied the content from. When I described how I'd come up with it myself I don't think he really believed me, but he did eventually give me an A.
On the one hand it was a bit insulting that he didn't think I was capable of writing it and that I was a cheater. For better or worse, I never cheated on any test, paper or exam. But ultimately I felt a sort of pride that I'd turned something in that, apparently, no other student had ever come up with and which seemed far enough beyond what most of his undergrad students were doing that it made him suspicious. In a weird way, it was a compliment.
I think back on that now and thank God it happened long before the advent of AI. If the same thing happened now, I'm sure the professor would have accused me of cheating and he'd have an easy explanation for how I'd done it. I would have become a false positive.
And that's really the least of the problems that high schools and colleges are facing these days. The bottom line is that AI is already everywhere in education. Lots of students, maybe most of them, are using it and quite a few of them are outright cheating on papers and even in class assignments. Yesterday the Atlantic published a first hand account by a high school student.
I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable.
During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs...
AI has softened the consequences of procrastination and led many students to avoid doing any work at all. As a consequence, these programs have destroyed much of what tied us together as students. There is little intensity anymore. Relatively few students seem to feel that the work is urgent or that they need to sharpen their own mind. We are struggling to receive the lessons of discipline that used to come from having to complete complicated work on a tight deadline, because chatbots promise to complete our tasks in seconds...
The dominant worldview seems to be: Why worry about actually learning anything when you can get an A for outsourcing your thinking to a machine?
That the outcomes of this might not actually be beneficial in most cases doesn't seem to matter much to the companies who are doing their best to push adoption of AI products in schools.
The biggest AI companies are also making back-to-school plans, ramping up their outreach to students and their families themselves. Google added studying-oriented features to its search platform’s AI Mode. OpenAI, in addition to announcing a deal to embed its models in the popular Canvas learning management system, introduced a study mode.
The companies’ outreach is extending to the largest US teachers unions too. In July, Microsoft, along with OpenAI and Anthropic PBC, announced a $23 million partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to create the National Academy of AI Instruction, which intends to train 400,000 teachers—about a tenth of the US total—over five years. Microsoft’s investment in that partnership is part of Microsoft Elevate, a new global initiative focused on AI training, research and advocacy, which aims to donate $4 billion over five years to schools and nonprofits. That initiative also encompasses a partnership with the National Education Association (NEA), which will include technical support and a $325,000 grant.
The president of the AFT, Randi Weingarten, said in an interview that she’s come to believe that AI will be as transformative as the printing press and that teachers should learn to use it. With limited government support for any large-scale training, she felt she had little choice but to turn to Silicon Valley. “Professional development done by teachers for teachers is actually the best thing to do,” she said, “but where are you going to find that money?”
There's a dystopian possibility for how this works out, one which doesn't seem that far off.
Alex Molnar, a director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, imagines one possible scenario in which everyone relies so heavily on AI that students can’t explain the thinking behind their assignments, teachers can’t explain the thinking behind their student evaluations, and administrators can’t explain the thinking behind their strategic decisions. All the while, local funds and data flow to faraway private corporations. “We essentially will have then transformed public education,” he warned, “from a civic institution into a portal for funneling money to private interests.”
There are, of course, going to be good students who do their own work and good teachers who don't hand their teaching assignments over to AI, but given the relative ease of doing less those people might be the exceptions. Put another way, there have always been students who cheated on assignments, but now it's so easy. And more than that, it's being welcomed by some teachers. There's every reason to think the number of students who cheat has gone up dramatically which also means the number who are actually learning anything from their assignments is much lower than it used to be.
The Chronicle of Higher Education created a video a few months ago interviewing a series of college students about their experiences with AI. Some of these students admit to using it for research, but all of them say they've seen it abused by fellow students and by kids coming up behind them. AI has only been around for a few years but it's already fair to ask if it has destroyed education for a lot of students who now have the ability to cheat their way through school without learning much of anything.
