The last time I offered up advice to college students generative AIs (ChatGPT and friends) were just emerging. Now AI tools are a critical part of work in a lot of fields. College students are using these tools all over the place. So I would like to offer some suggestions and thoughts for those in college who are using, or tempted to use, AI to complete their assignments.
As you are about to see I have concerns about using AI in your education. That doesn’t mean I’m opposed to all things AI. I using it in my work when it’s useful, and in keeping with company policy. I use it on side projects even more. Generative AIs are down right useful – when used in the right context.
Using AI for College Assignments
AI’s were not created as a learning tool. It’s not that they can’t be useful in helping your learn. Tools are coming out that are hoping to use generative AI as study platforms. You can use AI to generate extra problem sets, flash cards, quizzes, and other tools for you to use as practice. But if AI is generating the answers for you, or writing your paper, than you are not doing the work. If you are not working, you are not learning.
Learning should be hard. Learning friction is good. If you are using AI to make learning easy, you’re doing it wrong.
If you want to learn don’t use AI. If you want to be employable, don’t use AI for your course work. If you don’t want to learn, please skip college: don’t waste your money or your professor’s time.
Learning Requires Practice
When I give talks conferences about communications skills, I say practice is critical for improvement. I also tell them never use AI when practicing.
The analogy I use is that learning is like working out at the gym:
If I want to get stronger, I can go to a gym and lift weights. If I go on a regular basis, and put in sufficient effort, I’ll get stronger. But if I decide that my goal is to get heavy things off the ground, I could use a forklift. That forklift will get much heavier stuff off the ground than I ever will. But I won’t get stronger.
AI is like a forklift: it’s powerful when used by a skillful operator, but it is not designed to make you smarter.
College assignments are a form of practice. They help you build new skills. Even if they feel useless, you need to do them yourself.
Their Work Isn’t That Good Anyway
On the whole AIs write bad college essays. I don’t care that their creators claim they do college level work – they don’t.
Some of you feel like AI’s produce good college essays. How sure are you that you know what good work looks like? Are you sure your professors agree?
You may also believe that no one notices when you hand in an AI-written or edited essay. Why do you assume because you don’t get in trouble no one sees what happened?
My wife generally reports that AI generated papers handed in by her students usually fail to meet the assignment in basic ways, and therefore frequently don’t get graded at all. Her colleagues tell me similar things. That generally means they get a zero.
As for if someone notices: just because you don’t get busted doesn’t mean they don’t notice. Right now, in far too many colleges, there is little incentive for professors to punish you. Punishing cheaters often requires doing hours of miserable unpaid work. A zero, or other low grades, requires minimal work.
I know professors who admit they are letting students get away with AI generated work. They assume the professional struggles that come later will be punishment enough. In short, they expect me to punish you by not hiring you or firing you for incompetence.
This is bad for all of us. I blame the administrators who worry more about your current satisfaction than your long-term success.
But My Professors Use It!
Students like to raise the argument that professors use AI, therefore students should be allowed to use AI. This is a hollow argument, but let’s spend some time with it anyway.
The core of this argument is that it’s hypocritical to suggest using AI is bad in one context and acceptable in another. But in life context matters. Why should they be held to the same standard as you are? Their job is to support and guide your learning. You goal should be to learn.
There are lots of important things students benefit from doing that professionals rarely do.
A good Computer Science program will put you through a course on algorithms. In that course you should learn about sorting algorithms and one of your assignments should be to code one. I took that course, wrote that code, and have never written another sort from scratch.
In fact most of the actual algorithms you learn in that course most professional developers will never write. There are excellent libraries already written that do these basic operations really well. That doesn’t mean writing sorting algorithms in college was a waste of my time – it was extremely useful! I learned a lot doing it.
Same with writing in English (or other human languages) – you need to be good at it. To get good you need to do it – a lot.
You need the practice. Your professors don’t.
Letting the AI do the Work Makes You Lazy
One of the reasons that your professors are right to prevent you from using AI, while potentially using it themselves, is that AI makes it easy to be lazy.
When I use an AI to write code I notice very quickly the temptation to be lazy about checking the output of the AI. I know I cannot trust the output, but it is hard to stay engaged in reviewing all the code an AI generates.
The only thing, really, that keeps me focused is that I am extremely price sensitive: I once spent 25¢ on a task with Cline (one of the better AI tools for developers). A whole QUARTER! Worse, the code looked good but wasn’t actually good.
You have to read, and understand, everything you have an AI generate. That can take nearly as much effort as creating it in first place. But because you didn’t create it, your brain isn’t engaged with the details. That means you have to work harder to do the review.
A Tiny Exception
There is a tiny exception to all this: Assignments designed to help you examine how an LLM works and what they do well.
These will be assignments where your professor tells you to use AI. That is the one and only time I think they can make sense in an academic setting – at least currently. One day that could change, but we are a long way from that.
I Need to Know How to Use AI for My Job
Yes. The future of work, heck the present of work, involves people using AI to make us more efficient. But college is not a job training program – it’s about learning how to learn. College should equip you with the skills to grow and adapt over time.
AIs are one type of tool you will need. There are lots of tools you will need to learn to use. To use any tool you also need to understand what good and bad results look like when you use it. That takes understanding of the fundamentals of what the tool is doing. College isn’t the only way to learn fundamental skills, it isn’t even the best way for everyone, but it’s a great way for a lot of people if you do the work.
Leverage the skills you learn while learning in college to teach yourself how to use AI tools.
Remember That Integrity Matters
In the working world good managers don’t have time to check every detail – they need to be able to trust you to do the right thing when no one is watching.
I need to be able to trust the members of my team. I need to know that they are following company policy without my reminding them. They need to be honest with me when there are challenges and they need support. When they make mistakes I need them to admit it so we can work together to rectify the situation.
If you cheat your way through college, why should I believe that you are going to have integrity in any of those conditions?
If I have determine that you used AI to short cut your college learning, why should I believe that you aren’t going to use AI when it’s a security or privacy risk? Why should I believe you can do the work yourself at all?
Please, take the time to do the hard work and show up knowing how to learn the tools that do not exist today.