Professors are fighting an uphill battle against the intrusion of AI into education, and it’s forcing them to rethink how they instruct their students, many of whom have already become hopelessly dependent on the tech.
“It’s driving so many of us up the wall,” one told The Guardian in a new piece that interviewed more than a dozen professors in the humanities.
“I now talk about AI with my students not under the framework of cheating or academic honesty but in terms that are frankly existential,” Dora Zhang, a literature professor at UC Berkeley said. “What is it doing to us as a species?”
Alas, students looking for an easy “A” may not be interested in philosophical inquiries on how AI is fundamentally changing how we interact with the world and with each other — and indeed, according to a burgeoning body of research, how our brains work.
One canary in the coal mine comes from a Carnegie Mellon study published in early 2025 that found that knowledge workers who regularly used and trusted the accuracy of AI tools were losing their critical thinking skills. An earlier study found a link between students who relied on ChatGPT and memory loss, procrastination, and worsening academic performance. And an MIT study that performed EEG scans on subjects who were asked to write essays with and without ChatGPT found that AI users had the lowest levels of cognitive engagement during the tasks.
Working in the trenches, most professors, especially in the humanities, probably didn’t need formal research to tell them what those studies found, when they could easily intuit it by interacting with their pupils. Michael Clune, a literature professor and novelist, lamented to The Guardian that many students are now “incapable of reading and analyzing, synthesizing data, all kinds of skills.” Clune’s school, Ohio State University, recently required all students to enroll in “AI fluency” courses “across every major,” ostensibly to prepare them for a world that is dominated by the tech.
Clune was critical of the push. “No one knows what that means,” he told newspaper. “In my case, as a literature professor, these tools actually seem to mitigate against the educational goals I have for my students.”
OSU may be the most egregious example of capitulating to the whims of Big Tech, but the AI industry has its tendrils all across education. Companies like OpenAI and Microsoft have poured tens of millions of dollars into teachers’ unions, providing training on how to use their AI systems. They’ve also partnered with numerous institutions to provide their students with free access to their AI tools. Duke University, after entering such a partnership with OpenAI, introduced its own AI tool called “DukeGPT.” Abroad, xAI founder Elon Musk partnered with the government of El Salvador to launch the “world’s first nationwide AI-powered education program” to provide his Grok chatbot to a million students across thousands of public schools.
“These companies are giving these technological tools away partly because they’re hoping to addict a generation of students,” Eric Hayot, a comparative literature professor at Penn State, told The Guardian. “This is part of every single class I teach now, talking to students about why I’m not using AI, why they shouldn’t use AI.”
But pedagogues aren’t taking this sitting down. Some are now using oral interrogations and requiring handwritten notebooks, they told the paper. AgainstAI, a faculty-run initiative that advises professors on how to work around AI use, recommends giving assignments like oral exams, requiring students to show pictures of their notes, and paper journals.
Some even dare to be optimistic. Several said they noticed more students pushing back or expressing more cynicism about AI tools. “I think the current crop of gen Z students are seeing that they are the guinea pigs in this giant social experiment,” Zhang said.
“There’s kind of defeatism, this idea that there’s no stopping technology and resistance is futile, everything will be crushed in its path,” Clune added. “That needs to change… We can decide that we want to be human.”
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