You have an essay due tomorrow along with a thousand other assignments to do, you’re in complete panic, you don’t know what to do, and this essay will be the ultimate determinant of your quarter grade. You are faced with a dilemma—stay up late and complete the assignment with your academic integrity still intact or just use ChatGPT to write the entire essay. Be honest, which one are you choosing? Two weeks go by and you receive your essay grade—a big fat A+. You think to yourself how easy and efficient it is to use ChatGPT, and you use it more and more. However, you soon notice some creeping downsides. You begin to struggle with punctuation, notice some regression in your critical thinking, and independent and novel thoughts are nearly non-existent. It’s as though the pursuit of instant gratification has eaten away your academic capabilities all the way to ground zero.
Education and learning is the accumulation of knowledge, and the ability to support, analyze, and evaluate information is of the utmost importance. When we lose our penchant for higher order thinking and instead become too dependent on a tool to conduct our reasoning for us, we lose the ability to search for logic behind our own claims.
Living in a world that depends heavily on the benefits generated by artificial intelligence renders the usage of AI completely inevitable. We now even see examples of schools with obscene budgets for generating entirely AI-derived curriculums. While this welcomes in helpful innovations such as personalized and self-paced learning, we also see a degree of intellectual dependence on an inhuman tool to continue remolding our educational system. These institutional changes are clearly not confined to our society. In China, for example, a 2025 Wall Street Journal Article discusses how artificial intelligence can be used to assess a student’s concentration. None of this seems particularly detrimental until we take a closer look.
On the frontlines of education teachers are beginning to share their accounts of teaching students who cannot think for themselves. In a Fox News story, Hannah, a former teacher, states, “I think AI can be in a classroom in a very effective way if we teach children in the older grades how to use it properly. But if we’re allowing them this unlimited access in the classroom to use AI, they’re not going to do the work themselves.” She would later explain that many of the essays students turned in had detection of AI usage. Perhaps most alarmingly, despite being given an opportunity to redeem their grade, students would frequently choose a failing grade over writing an essay on their own. This level of intellectual apathy and learned helplessness may be reflective of broader social and intellectual trends that are of great concern. Studies from 2025 MIT further suggest the negative effects of using ChatGPT, describing students who were asked to write several SAT essays using ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, or none. With the study finalized, researchers found that ChatGPT users displayed a consistent underperformance through linguistic and behavior levels in addition to lower brain engagement.
Many concerns have arisen about the perceived declining value of the college experience. The marketplaces of true academic inquiry seem to be being saturated with artificial work, reflective of an artificial technology. The inextricable tethering of education and artificial intelligence compels us to consider the totality of the tradeoffs: Is the loss of academic integrity and critical thinking in humanity worth an unpredictable efficiency in technology? As with most live human social evolutions, this is a multifaceted question whose answer will be revealed in ways we cannot possibly predict. Time will prove to reveal a more comprehensive judgement.
And if you’re wondering, no, this essay wasn’t written by ChatGPT.