I remember my library orientation in grammar school. My classmates and I gathered around wooden filing drawers, where we read index cards containing Dewey decimals. These index cards, the librarian told us, were the entry to a world of ideas. We could use them to locate books. It was mesmerizing.
This whole process seemed anticlimactic, however, the very next day. That day, the same librarian explained that book-locating information was also available on a website. We could select books quickly, all while sitting in a chair.
In those days, we lived in the seams of the digital and pre-digital age. The librarian was not confident that the new technology would persist. So, as kids, we kept one foot planted in each world, learning the digital landscape while also physically navigating libraries.
A refrain throughout educational history is reckoning with new tools—embracing, rejecting, ignoring, or otherwise. Digital card catalogues are an example. And perhaps because many tools have been an asset in educational spaces—facilitating the process of learning—many schools have developed broadly hospitable stances toward them. But not all tools are equally constructive. Some tools undermine our learning. The most recent example is ChatGPT.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that creates human-like conversations using natural language processing. Stated simply, it responds to the questions one asks, drawing on stores of information and interactions with other users. ChatGPT is widely used. Within the first two months of its launch in January of 2023, there were already 100 million active users.[1]
Where ChatGPT impacts education, most worryingly, is in completing tasks assigned to students. Students can outsource thinking—allowing AI to digest difficult readings on their behalf. They can also request that ChatGPT construct essays assigned by professors.
ChatGPT is still new, and teachers and institutions have varying policies regulating its use—some more stringent, some more lenient. Regardless, there are strong reasons students should resist this tool. Here are three.
1. Genuine learning is transformative
In “An Invitation to the Pain of Learning,” Mortimer Adler writes:
Anyone who has done any thinking, even a little bit, knows that it is painful. It is hard work—in fact, the very hardest that human beings are ever called upon to do. It is fatiguing, not refreshing. If allowed to follow the path of least resistance, no one would ever think.[2]
This is a problem, Adler continues, because “genuine learning is…thinking,” and thinking is transformative.[3] It involves an interior transformation of a person’s mind and character.
Often when my students use ChatGPT and related technologies, they do so to avoid the arduous task of thinking. This is a problem because much of the transformative work of their educations occurs through the process of wrestling with ideas and discerning their significance. To outsource this work means a student comes away unchanged, or uneducated.
Furthermore—in the same way that finishing a marathon can be painful yet life-giving, or completing a difficult work task can be challenging but satisfying—learning is not simply painful. It is also deeply enjoyable, full of wonder, pleasant, and gratifying. Learning is worth the difficulty.
2. Learning to write is learning to think
When I first entered college, I would start my essays and get lost. I lost my place in arguments, was disorganized, and never knew what was important enough to include.
This was not just an issue of my writing—as though I was a clear-minded thinker who struggled to put things on paper. My issues in writing demonstrated that I was not good at thinking. My weaknesses as a thinker just became obvious when I tried to write things down.
I point this out because sometimes students think of writing as busy work. Now that they have ChatGPT to write essays on their behalf—bad essays, by the way, but essays nonetheless—they eagerly outsource that task. But learning to write is learning to think. Thinking is something we need to do well to flourish as human beings.
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3. Your character is implicated in your coursework
Earlier I cited Adler on the painfulness of learning. This may sound familiar if you have read a difficult book or struggled through an essay. In those moments, it can be tempting to quit and do anything else, rather than to ‘stay in place’ and do your work.
But remaining in difficulty is part of human freedom—to commit to some good end and to see it through to completion. Can you make yourself complete a difficult task without being turned aside by distractions or quitting? If not, you are not really a free person.
Sure, AI can do tasks for you. But you miss the opportunity to grow in perseverance, resilience, and self-control. Moreover, given that AI is a platform for which plagiarism and false ascriptions of content ownership are norms, there are other integrity reasons to resist its use.
Final thoughts
Education is about the formation of a person. ChatGPT and related technologies undermine this important task. My recommendation is for students to resist the temptation to use it in the context of reading and writing, if indeed they wish to be transformed by their learning.
