College Students Losing Ability to Participate in Class Discussions Since They Offloaded Their Thinking to AI
Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech It’s well known that students from grade schools to the big universities are increasingly outsourcing their thinking to large language models (LLMs). The consequences are already measurable: elementary students are losing cognitive skills, leading them to tank their exams. Harder to quantify — but impossible to miss if you’ve spent any time in school lately — is the situation unfolding across classrooms, where students from all layers of society have become empty vessels that parrot the outputs of AI without critically engaging with the subject matter at hand. One student at Yale University, identified as Amanda, told CNN that the monotonous prose of ChatGPT is even seeping into Ivy-league seminars. As the student and her classmates have observed, in-class conversations among peers are becoming increasingly flat and predictable, a symptom of students leaning on AI to think through discussions for them. During one memorable awkward silence in class, Amanda told CNN she saw “someone typing ferociously on their …
