Educators question impact as studies link student reliance on AI tools with diminished creativity

Let me try to communicate what it feels like to be an English teacher in 2025. Reading an AI-generated text is like eating a jelly bean when you’ve been told to expect a grape. Not bad, but not… real.

The artificial taste is only part of the insult. There is also the gaslighting. Stanford professor Jane Riskin describes AI-generated essays as “flat, featureless… the literary equivalent of fluorescent lighting.” At its best, reading student papers can feel like sitting in the sun of human thought and expression. But then two clicks and you find yourself in a windowless, fluorescent-lit room eating dollar-store jelly beans.

Thomas David Moore notes that there is nothing new about students trying to get one over on their teachers — there are probably cuneiform tablets about it — but when students use AI to generate what Shannon Vallor, philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh, calls a “truth-shaped word collage,” they are not only gaslighting the people trying to teach them, they are gaslighting themselves. In the words of Tulane professor Stan Oklobdzija, asking a computer to write an essay for you is the equivalent of “going to the gym and having robots lift the weights for you.”

In the same way that the amount of weight you can lift is the proof of your training, lifting weights is training; writing is both the evidence of learning and a learning experience. Most of the learning we do in school is mental strengthening: thinking, imagining, reasoning, evaluating, judging. AI removes this work, and leaves a student unable to do the mental lifting that is the proof of an education.

Research supports concerns about AI’s impact on student learning. A recent study from MIT Media Lab indicates that using AI tools may reduce neural connectivity linked with active learning processes and highlights possible cognitive drawbacks even though large language models provide immediate convenience.

In this way, AI is an existential threat to education and we must take this threat seriously.

Why are we fascinated by these tools? Is it a matter of shiny-ball chasing or does the fascination with AI reveal something older, deeper and more potentially worrisome about human nature? In her book The AI Mirror, Vallor uses the myth of Narcissus to suggest that the seeming “humanity” of computer-generated text is a hallucination of our own minds onto which we project our fears and dreams.

Jacques Offenbach’s 1851 opera, “The Tales of Hoffmann,” serves as another metaphor for current attitudes toward artificial intelligence. In Act I, Hoffmann falls for Olympia—an automaton—only after donning glasses described as “eyes that show you what you want to see.” According to New York Times critic Jason Farago’s review about soprano Erin Morley’s performance at The Met Opera House production: "Morley was playing the 19th-century version of artificial intelligence but...the choice to imagine notes beyond those written in score was supremely human—the kind...that I fear might be slipping from my students’ writing."

Hoffmann doesn’t fall in love with Olympia until he puts on Coppelius’s glasses; once removed he sees her as merely mechanical—a fraud.

So here we are: stuck between AI dreams and classroom realities.

There has been significant investment activity around artificial intelligence recently—with projections estimating $3 trillion from companies such as Oracle, SoftBank and OpenAI over three years—and legislation debated in Congress aimed at limiting state regulation on emerging technologies was narrowly avoided this summer (source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/us/politics/congress-ai-regulation.html). Meanwhile reports show that during early 2025 alone contributions from advances in artificial intelligence have surpassed consumer spending growth within real GDP figures (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-10/artificial-intelligence-gdp-impact).

Sam Altman—CEO at OpenAI—has publicly stated his belief that up to 70 percent jobs could disappear due directly or indirectly through advances brought by generative technologies like ChatGPT. He told Harvard Gazette: "Writing a paper old-fashioned way not going be thing...Using tool best discover express communicate ideas...that’s where things going go future."

Teachers who are more invested in thinking skills than financial prospects may disagree with such predictions.

Adjusting assessment practices could help educators address widespread adoption among students; some college students report universal usage patterns according interviews given recently (source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/05/15/chatgpt-student-use). Alternatives might include oral presentations or ungraded projects requiring original thought rather than relying solely upon computers—even if these methods demand more time during class sessions.

Critically questioning how much influence artificial intelligence should have inside classrooms remains essential for teachers facing institutional enthusiasm for rapid technological integration into curricula—a point raised by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna who ask whether systems are ever accurately described as "human" within their book The AI Con published earlier this year.

In June—at end poetry unit characterized by formulaic submissions—a teacher decided all poems would now be handwritten during class sessions only; while fewer forms were covered each student contributed unique work through repeated revision aloud exercises intended stimulate creative processes independently without digital aid.

As described by those present it felt different compared previous weeks: authentic rather than synthetic—a return sense normalcy reminiscent recovery following brief illness—not just productive but genuinely human.