We hear a lot about how college students are happy to use AI to help with their studies, if not churn out entire assignments. But is this too one-sided a narrative? Many appear to be having the opposite experience with the tech.
Jeff Sharlet, a writing professor at Dartmouth College, said that his students are consumed by “resignation” and “despair” as they find themselves in an “arms race” to adopt AI or fall behind in their studies, facing relentless pressure from peers and instructors alike.
“Many say they hate it, don’t want to use it, but they feel like now it’s submit or fail,” Sharlet wrote in a lengthy and sobering Bluesky thread. “They feel like there’s no escaping it,” he later added. “And they don’t like it.”
AI has made rapid inroads into education. Students quickly started AI for classwork after the launch of ChatGPT, and universities have encouraged the practice by signing deals with tech companies like OpenAI to provide students access to their AI tools. The discourse around all this tends to focus on cheating and plunging reading and math skills, treating students as a monolith of underachievers who eagerly embrace the tech.
On the ground, the reality is more complicated. To gauge the situation, Sharlet asked his students to submit their anonymous thoughts on AI — and none of them “really described it as improving their education,” he said.
At best they were ambivalent, trying to wean themselves off but finding themselves coming back for more — a galling testament to the deliberately addictive design of popular chatbots.
“I wish I could tell you the responses thrummed with defiance,” Sharlet reflected. “Instead, some read like substance abuse testimonies.”
One student’s use of AI grew until it wrote all their assignments. Then they “got caught. Crushed by shame. Swore it off. But it’s creeping back, and they don’t know how to stop.”
Others felt strongly against AI, with one student writing with “deep fury about AI taking over their education and wrecking mental health.” Some who refuse to use AI for ethical reasons “feel abandoned,” Sharlet reported.
The pressure is coming from all sides. Some professors require students to use AI, and the institutions themselves allow and encourage it; Sharlet notes that Dartmouth’s president cut a deal with Anthropic, a company that “stole the books of 133 faculty” without consulting the school’s educators.
“Several students wrote of the moral confusion implicit in a college that promotes AI and says don’t cheat but makes it really, really easy to cheat,” he wrote, likening it to how oil companies coined the term “carbon footprint” to “offload responsibility” onto the individual.
AI also bred resentment among peers. Students reported “their disdain for friends who use it to do all their work,” while saying they “only” use it to summarize or do research.
This is the other consequence of AI in education. Its mere introduction sows mistrust, while the institutions pushing it are unwilling to take ownership of its myriad flaws — pushing its use despite its incredible temptation as a tool for cheating, not to mention its less tangible but more nefarious cognitive effects that emerging research has shown such as impairing critical thinking.
In all, it’s being left up to students to figure out how AI is supposed to transform their learning, to serve as unwitting test subjects who will also be the ones to take the fall if they use AI in a manner that’s “wrong,” while AI companies and the school administrators they partner with get to brag they’re providing them with all the cutting-edge tools they need to succeed.
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