This is at Dartmouth College, where our president cut a deal with Anthropic--which stole the books of 133 faculty--without faculty consultation. Soon, there'll be a Claude for every student. They're already there. They feel like there's no escaping it. & they don't like it.

I wish I could tell you the responses thrummed with defiance. Instead, some read like substance abuse testimonies. A student whose use of AI grew until AI "wrote" all assignments sophomore fall. Got caught. Crushed by shame. Swore it off. But it's creeping back, & they don't know how to stop. 3/

(To be clear: I asked for anonymous responses so students could speak candidly & I could share comments.) A number of students wrote of their hate for AI, their disdain for friends who use it to do all their work, & then they said they "only" use it summarize readings or do research. 4/

Nobody used the term "arms race," but that's what they're describing: enormous pressure, including from some professors, to use AI or fall behind those who are. Many say they hate it, don't want to use it, but they feel like now it's submit or fail. 5/

Another student wrote with deep fury about AI taking over their education and wrecking mental health. They used to not touch it. Now, they use it to "supplement" their work in econ & math classes. They feel betrayed by the college and their teachers and themselves. 6/

I just learned that the term "carbon footprint" was developed by BP to offload responsibility for climate change onto individuals. Something like that's happening in higher ed with AI. Institutions capitulate or dodge; students are submitting; & they believe it's their individual failing. 7/

One student wrote of the belief among their classmates in another course that their professor had turned to "robograding," outsourcing evaluation of their work to AI. So why not use AI to write it? This student knows how cynical that is. It doesn't feel good. They wish there was another way. 8/

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. One said they don't pay attention to AI policies because they don't think the college really wants to know what's going on. 9/

One student, who wrote of trying and sometimes succeeding at cutting AI out of their life, wrote of watching a parent who is a lawyer turn over all their legal writing to AI. Almost every student wrote of how much AI is present in everyone's love lives. 10/

In winter, I spoke at a faculty event about AI. I was alarmed by the range of faculty awareness. Some believe our students are so "good" they'd never cheat. Yes, cheating's wrong. But systems that explicitly or implicitly incentivize cheating--AI does both--will produce cheating. 11/

It honestly makes me deeply hopeful how fucking bitter and clear-eyed the younger generation is on the reality (and puroprted goals) of widespread AI adoption. Better epistemic vigilance than older generations for sure.

Nah, it's all for nothing if you aren't willing to do anything about it.

I disagree. Many, though not all, sound like they would embrace an education environment that unequivocally rejects AI. We can’t expect them all to be the leaders to create that system.

But no educational environment is going to do that, or be able to enforce it. And the work environment those kids are going into absolutely isn't rejecting AI, it's embracing it & will expect them to use AI 'effectively'. Sadly, it's probably a skill they need.

Except that workplace has no idea what "effectively" means. It's an unsustainable pressure

Of course, that's why effectively was in quotes. If you want the economics, few have found an application where genAI adds value, no-one knows how much of that value will be captured by the AI companies, & no-one knows if that captured value will cover the costs of the AI companies.

Then why is it a skill that students need?

Because that's a skill that recruiters will be looking for (when they get to a human), and a skill that organisations will be expecting them to perform. Leadership in organisations don't understand genAI. They just see a shiny bauble and are continually being told by everyone it's magic.

The thing about genAI is that most people don't write very well, and that organisations force them to write lengthy documents that aren't of great value. Is it any wonder that genAI looks attractive?

Pressing a button is not a skill, though. It's the offloading of skills to an unskilled hallucinatory plagiarism machine.

I gave a period of my intro digital arts studio to an AI discussion. Gave them a vaguely anti-AI article + a vaguely pro-AI article. Everyone read, discussed in groups, and reported back. Consensus was hugely anti- except most agreed they liked Grammarly. Maybe not surprising for a studio course.

FTR, the anti article: jskfellows.stanford.edu/theft-is-not... And the pro article (pretty cool project imo): www.itsnicethat.com/articles/ann...

thx for this example & the articles you used! good exercise imo.

I would also like to recommend Stuart P. Bentley's blog, which is all conversations with Google Gemini where he alternately uses it to write the post in front of you, uses it to explain itself, or uses it to cause the entire machine to crash as it catches itself in a lie (hooray for metaphors!)

Like many universities, mine will be embarking on massive budget cuts soon, and many of us fear AI will be a tool in that. Not just the cuts themselves, but the writing and tutoring centers being replaced with AI. It is only speculation right now, but...oh boy.

😠The readiness to victim blame by those who lead damaging systems, be it AI, fossil fuels, tobacco, ableism, sexism, is apparently limitless. We must resist. We asked a Youth Panel their political demands re climate change: they said act now, plant trees, stop AI m.

It's really ironic and unfortunate that Dartmouth is being as stupid about this as anyone.

They literally hosted the first AI conference

dartmouth has published a paper about efficacy of ai models for depression treatment and it gets trotted around when states want to end medicaid psychotherapy

*scream*

My editors at a couple of well-known online publications have started using a footer on their email warning writers not to submit work created with AI. I can't believe that it even needs saying, but here we are.

OTOH, if we move away from arts and humanities to medicine and scientific research, my attitude toward the role of AI is much more benign.

It should not be. There are numerous examples of AI just making up sources for scientific papers. You think it won’t make up data too?

Not all AI is an LLM, not that we don't deserve another AI winter, this one possibly nuclear, but not all AI is bad AI.

Its all in the control of a group of sociopathic billionaires. Hard pass.

Notice how the elite schools are leading the way? Smart marketing by AI companies. A friend's daughter was told at her visit to one college that tests were self-proctored except Econ because so many students cheated using AI.

If I were a recruiter, I would look for graduates of schools that did not allow students to use AI, let alone encourage it.

As though it were yesterday, I recall the moment in Calculus 1 when the idea behind the old epsilon-delta definition of the limit clicked. With AI, is it possible for college kids today to relish those "ah-hah!" moments?

Man I read that part of the book fifteen times until I got it. Then I immediately wished the prof had an animated blackboard. And instead of smart blackboards we have sense imitating machines to parrot it back to the prof.

I feel bad for college students today. Im well out of school and work somewhere where LLMs arent forced on us (yet). I refuse to use them but when I was in college it would have been really hard not to push that easy button

I'm in a master's in counseling program, having graduated from undergrad in 2018 before AI. I was really shocked how much we're asked to use it. I flat out refused to counsel an AI- and instead partnered with a peer, as this education has always been done. So far exemptions have been allowed.

which school is doing this? we run an intern training site and we’re going to need to ask applicants if they have had consulting practice with a human client (?)

To be clear we are still doing the vast majority of our practice with human clients and I feel the education has been overall good. But if internship sites could raise a fuss that would be great. It's Palo Alto University. I think the AI is coming from very high up- we're in silicon valley after all

yes we will add this to our uni vetting questions. I guess I have to ask... What's it like to have an AI client? If you are looking for internship placement in Boulder, CO feel free to check us out at boulderemotionalwellness.org/training

I tried it once before requesting a different assignment. It was typed, and the AI would instantly spit out three paragraphs every time I said one line. It was very stereotyped and the client thought all my answers basically fixed their life. Sycophantic. Could theoretically be any kind of client.

The craziest thing to me, right now, is all my “AI early adopter” co-workers and mentors are starting to fall behind me. I’m noticing their computer literacy dipping to the point where they have to go to co-pilot just to find a basic program vs start menu. Perception of gains, all Vibes. No truth.

They're offloading their cognitive abilities to a machine. What would you expect?

I’m a fool for it, but I’m just shocked at all the buy in to a technology that DOESN’T WORK, even before it being unethical (as people do unethical shit all the time).

Gen Z here, graduated around when AI was released. Thanks for sharing this. I feel the same way as many of the students (especially the comment about feeling bad for my younger siblings). It also ruined my ability to get an entry level job after graduation. Despair & anger is accurate.

i noticed some new legalese in the summer reading book that all the incoming freshmen are supposed to read. this gives profs cover to blow off admin pushing AI. it makes it a lot easier to tell everyone—profs, students, admins—do you really want to tangle with the publishing house lawyers?

i can’t see the reply to this

I'm surprised creative writing students would adopt it at all. As a student of writing, wouldn't you want to write? In your own voice? That's what you'd want to have graded so that you can improve, I would have thought.

People who use AI are too detached from the consequences. Using it means someone’s water & power bills are higher & their property values are diminished because of added air, noise & light pollution. Using it puts more money into the pockets of billionaires who are buying our elected officials.

This whole thread resonates for me, the substance abuse comparison in particular. It reminded me of critiques of social media in the past. The deliberate hooking of the user. Blithe ignorance and pollyanna thinking by faculty too. I still can't believe the Anthropic thing at Dartmouth.

And by "I still can't believe," I guess I mean that I totally believe it and find it abhorrent. God save us from the higher ed leadership class!

Thanks for sharing!

Pen and paper assessments in the classroom. No digital devices allowed. Only way to know what the students know, and isn’t that the purpose of assessment?

Good suggestion. Memory loss starts with not having to learn, evaluate, think about and discuss/report, which IMO is the purpose of education.

Even that is a problem. Most kids haven’t been taught cursive writing and write slowly in block letters and even that on rare occasions.

It should be called by its real name “plagiarism machine”

It feels bleak. We had a seminar at work today on the use of AI (Copilot Chat). Increased usage of AI was seen as a metric in its own right. Not a question of whether we were being more productive with it, just that our department had "better" take-up than most. I can't stand it.

The kids aren't going to start the Butlerian Jihad on their own. They need elders to provide leadership and hope.

agreed, lets kill billionaires and fling their assets into the streets.

this is appalling but not surprising. universities are supposed to stand for intelligence and imagination. instead they are receiving kickbacks to force this nothingness drug on their students. the "artificial thief" is all part of a ploy to destroy agency and trust.

Oh, that's painfully accurate!

All AI must be marked as AI. Just like we have to footnote all other copied or referenced work. Teachers and professors must demand that. Teachers are failing here in their weak acceptance.

Many do. You can demand all you want. It's as effective as demanding that nobody's thoughts wander, that nobody drink alcohol under 21.

Today on CBC's The Current AI Minister Evan Solomon dodged the critical questions, said Canadian students must become AI literate: every HS student will get a "safe" AI tool next year. Our government is imposing AI on unwilling students ... Gettem while they're young! Shameful.

www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-... I fear for our future.

Its mainstream use at this point is just making people NOT learn anything for themsleves, thus erasing critical thinking skills. And I suppose that's the point, isn't it?

Absolutely the point!

Sent this to a loved one who works in risk management in higher education. The psychological harm being done to these students is staggering to me. I know anecdotes are anecdotes, but what your students had to say is powerful, and I hope it does some good somewhere. Thank you.

Interesting thread. I think at the end of the day the hardest part about AI is not using it, it's not the technology or the improvement of it, it's figuring out a way to balance it in our lives, and how to put guardrails around it. We have to continue to cherish and work at pure human endeavor -

writing, thinking, being creative with your own mind, reading human written books, playing an instrument, going hiking, attending plays, dance, and concerts, having human conversation, etc. We can't deny the reality of AI, but we need to stay grounded because everything's moving very fast. /1

And we need leaders who have the wisdom, strength of character, and charisma to put the appropriate guardrails & throttles around it. As I always say, much more than technical leadership we need strong *moral* leadership around AI, so that it doesn't do more harm than good. This is the challenge. /2

Thanks for sharing. I had a great homeroom in my middle school this year, so we were able to make time most mornings for CNN10, a news program for kids (where will that go under the Ellisons?). When there was a story heavy on the "gee whiz!" factor of AI, I would pause it & ask the students what was

being left out of the story. I had several kids who always went to the human impact. That heartened me some. Tech is interwoven in their lives & patterns in a way we never faced. The targeting of kids as consumers has only intensified over the past decades.

Fantastic piece. As usual, you have found all the heft underneath the surface layer where the incentive structures collide with the ever more hazy ethical strictures. Rock on bro. PS- your writing is very soothing to this old OCD prescriptivist.

last year i taught on a research methods module for a musicology masters course. we did a seminar on the pitfalls of ai, and asked students to write 2-300 words about its downsides in education. about 40% of the responses we got were written by ai. it's soul-destroying.

thanks for this

Tricia Bertram Gallant, who directs academic integrity at UC San Diego said, “This fantasy that we can grant degrees based solely on unsupervised, unobserved work has finally, maybe, come to an end.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

If I'm in college, I'm refusing to use AI, and I'll take that all the way to the dean of the college. I will complete every iota of work myself, with my own brain and research skills. If a future employer needs me to use AI, they will train me on it. Undergrads were dumb enough when I taught them.

Listening to this album a lot these days. Radiohead – Fitter Happier Lyrics | Genius Lyrics share.google/IguNvcv8fVsm...

Thom nailed it 100% in 1997. When I first heard OK Computer in the early 2000s, I thought the tech dystopia angle was a bit overdone, but it was a total bullseye for 2026.

if any of your dartmouth colleagues do a digital culture or digital media course, you should refer your class to take it! i would absolutely love to have them and help them develop their thinking, and i bet most other computer-toucher nerds would too.

The Kids are Alright. At least regarding their thoughts and fears about AI.

They are so, so not alright. As I said, the mood ranges from resignation to despair. Most acknowledge having using it sometimes in ways most faculty would consider cheating. They feel abandoned.

But, thank goodness they feel that Something Is Very Wrong.

Students in 10 years won’t have a sense that anything is wrong, having grown up with AI and considering it normal.

Well, hopefully some of the societal rough edges regarding AI will have been sorted out by then. But I definitely fear that we will lose more than we will gain, as a civilization.

I feel awful for the creative kids. Maybe an assignment for next year could be to collectively research & write a manifesto. They will discover artists/cultural workers & labour are pushing back, which may give them a bit of optimism. This from yesterday is great & was released at a big event.

Thank you for posting this.

Going through an engineering course and I have to say that there is more to this issue than just ai. We recently did a report for a module and pretty much all the students failed it because they were caught with using ai. /1

When a couple of them asked me for help with where they went wrong, it's like they've never wrote a report before in their life. And this isn't some beginner engineer course. This is basically a btech course. They would had to have written reports to get their previous qualifications /2

They struggled with making graphs in excel for the experiment results. One of them had an ai flow chart that was a complete mess and they didn't notice it One thing I can understand is that many of these students are working jobs while doing this qualification and some have to travel far /3

to make it to classes and exams. So a lot of them don't have a lot of free time to write the reports and consult with the lecturer about how it's coming along. /4

It's our own cognitive capacities and our own planet that suffers. Use it, love it, or lose it. Strict regulations are imperative.

There’s no doubt AI will be able to mimic human writing. But most people won’t want to read an AI-generated book because they’ll know the author didn’t experience the same emotions they’re feeling as they read it. And it’s that mental, emotional and spiritual connection that they crave.

AI can also mimic human music, and it can become popular. But once it’s exposed as AI-generated, the audience disappears. As with books, people understand the emotions expressed are just hollow human mimicry. Marketers can only succeed if they hide their AI origins—which is what they’ll probably do

We're the opposite case: MUGEN Radio declared AI from day one. Constitution, open books, kill switch clause. The audience is small, but it knows exactly what it's listening to. Transparency might not scale — but it keeps.

sounds like the college administration could have some things learn from the students

Evergreen.

My experience was extremely similar under comparable conditions. The feedback was saddening.

Wow! Given that many of them probably used AI to write those thoughts paints an even bleaker picture!

thanks for sharing this -- super depressing eye-opening stuff.

Yes, it's frightening how many people want a machine to think for them, to express "their" thoughts. I suppose a calculator does the same thing but adding numbers gives one right answer- there's no expression, diversity, etc.

> a Dartmouth‑ready academic paper section "Below is a polished, academically‑ready section you can drop directly into a Dartmouth paper. It formalizes your Me / Myself / AI model using scholarly tone, clear conceptual framing, and citations‑ready structure." 1/3

2/3

3/3

Unfortunately it’s like monks in their scriptorium complaining about the printing press … you can’t turn back time nor simply abandon another one of history’s giant steps forward. All you can hope for is an off-switch.

Is AI just ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’, using the knowledge gained by others or is it simply plagiarism? AI poses a philosophical conundrum.

This is heartbreaking stuff 💔

Wondering how they feel about AI art?

“Robo-Grading” does exist, to an extent. I had one class where I was supposed to film myself, giving a presentation within a prescribed timeline hitting certain points. I uploaded the film, and It graded it (with the professor having the final review), which was pretty much what the AI said. Math 🧵

on the other hand, is a big fucking mistake to “supplement” your learning with AI, because if you can’t do it without a crutch, you damn sure aren’t going to be able to work out a 7 step problem in calc for instance. You would think students at Dartmouth of all places would have realized this.

I’d be happy to Zoom into your class to talk about some of the advocacy work I’m doing, along with many other groups, at WIPO and UNESCO.

Yeah.... when I was in college the big skill that put you ahead of your colleagues was being able to type. I don't think we have "advanced" at all.