For a top-ranked college, the University of Texas’s student population displays an overwhelming reliance on AI.
Since the start of the fall semester, there have been multiple instances where a professor was giving a lecture and a student in front of me was using AI to refine their resume.
It’s the most business student thing ever. Don’t pay attention to your professor in class — but be sure to add the fact that you took the class on your resume. We don’t want to actually do the learning. We just want to write that we did it — with the help of ChatGPT or Claude, of course.
The disappointing truth is that using AI during instruction isn’t exclusive to my largest classes. As a matter of fact, the situation described above happened in a class of fewer than 50.Â
My two smallest classes are my English class, which has 15 students, and my Trojan War class, with 18 students. The classes are largely discussion-based, with historical and literary-based content as the foundation for conversation.
Here’s something you’ll find hard to believe: there have been cases in each of these classes where I have visually witnessed students feed discussion questions to their AI. Then, at an appropriate time, they raise their hand and contribute their “unique” idea to the class discussion.
This happened twice. Once in each class. Two completely different sets of students.
These are courses where the principal objective is to introduce students to new forms of thought. To grow our ability to communicate ideas. To encourage peer-to-peer exchange of opinion. And we are bypassing all of it.Â
If college is just a setting for us to AI our way through discussions and lectures, what will our future professional networks consist of but a bunch of play-pretend and winging it?
Last week, a consulting group I’m in needed to present our project progress to an audience. My team member used Claude to draft a slide deck template, and the presentation made zero sense. She almost kept an AI-generated slide detailing our “12-week plan,” when the project actually ends in a month. She spent more time attempting to decipher what blanks the AI wanted her to fill in than she would have if she created something from scratch.
Similarly, in my business communications class, a student was sharing her Gemini-made study schedule in preparation for an exam. I saw the guide — a lot of it was “study 15 minutes each day,” and “divide the textbook into sections.” Maybe I’m overestimating college students here, but formulating a study plan seems pretty intuitive to me. I don’t feel like it takes a lot out of me to say: “I’m going to study one chapter a day until the exam.” So why do we need reassurance from AI?
The thing is, people don’t want to think for themselves anymore. It’s second nature to turn to AI, and therefore she needed to study exactly the way Gemini instructed — (and my consulting teammate needed to write her slides the same as Claude’s templates) — because we don’t trust ourselves anymore. Not in comparison to a large-language model. And the more we turn to these mechanisms, the stronger our lack of confidence grows.
Turning to AI for the most mundane tasks is still different from asking AI to write for us. I’m not cynical enough to believe that anyone submits a writing prompt to AI and directly copies its output. Rather, students feed it drafts and ask it to input a few sentence suggestions here and there, or ask how it can be strongly rephrased.
Before, people landed jobs because they were able to write solid resumes and cover letters. They got into top colleges because their essays were impactful. Now, what separates a great communicator from a mediocre one who knows how to train AI? I’ve always liked to consider myself a good communicator. I can write a college essay; I can nail a cover letter. But if I’m pitted against people who take writing suggestions from AI, how long will it be before I fall behind the curve?
I opened this article by saying that the university has an alarmingly high AI reliance for such an intelligent student body. I suggested that our future jobs would all be “play-pretend” since we aren’t picking up real skills in our classes.
But maybe that “play-pretend” future has already arrived.
How many students on campus today used AI on their college admissions essay? Judging by the dependence I’ve witnessed, I’m leaning towards a majority. How many of these people took the spots of individuals who used only their original thoughts and words?
It may be pointless being as reprimanding as I am when our culture seems to be hurtling towards an AI-workforce at a thousand miles per hour. I can write a thousand more words on the environmental and ethical concerns of that, but there’s no denying, AI in the workforce is here to stay.
But workforce efficiency is very different from mediums of expression. If we can’t discern who actually has something meaningful to say, we’ve lost our ability to feel as a people. Nothing about the human experience will produce any real value.
Who’s to say that I didn’t use AI to write this very article?