I still remember November when ChatGPT came out and the exam period that followed.
As a professor at Harvard, I had B+ writers turn in their essays with em dashes and Oxford commas as if they were signed to Penguin. Just as their writing magically improved, their voices began to blur into what we now call “AI slop.”
But as one of the first victims of the AI slop tsunami, I refuse to succumb to the Luddism that led institutions to close their doors to AI for good.
Instead, we decided to bring AI to every corner of the classroom. Anything less than that will immediately feel like a dereliction of duty.
I think Gen Z needs to be taught to use AI responsibly.
Every generation struggles to enter the workforce, but few struggle as much as my Gen Z students. Reading the news, you might think that their struggle boils down to a mixture of laziness and entitlement, forgetting that ever since Aristotle, we have been blaming young people for everything that ails society.
In fact, they are struggling. Because we are asking them to excel at two things that are foreign to them.
They’re not only walking into an educational institution without answer guides or report cards, but they’re doing so at a time when tools that no one has taught them are redefining the way work itself is done.
When AI is taking over the workplace, we can’t react by pretending the tools don’t exist. You respond by teaching people how to use them well.
I now ask my students to use AI in every assignment
The most important lesson I teach my undergraduates is the same one I teach in my executive education classes. It’s about using AI responsibly, with personal growth in mind rather than outcome orientation.
I first tell my students not to lie to themselves about the kind of AI user they are becoming.
Are they centaurs who pieced together half their essays from ChatGPT, or are they cyborgs whose AI agents write emails in their sleep and automatically review Uber Eats orders?
Perhaps they are artisans, clinging ever tighter to what little humanity is left in us?
Whichever path you choose, practicing using AI for growth is easier than ever.
There are some basic rules they must follow
It starts by recognizing one of AI’s greatest strengths: its ability to rapidly integrate large bodies of knowledge and connect ideas across disparate silos. Students are accustomed to ChatGPT’s deep exploration, Perplexity’s search across academic journals, and Gemini’s ability to poke holes in arguments before typing a single word.
If students find material particularly difficult, as is often the case in my economics classes, they are allowed to use AI to “explain it like a 5-year-old” and apply the insights directly, instead of going through a PhD. to understand what they found.
But when it comes to drafting the discussion itself, my first rule is to pause the AI. The goal is to capture their thoughts as they are and give function to their thoughts before they have form, even if it means relying on voice notes to advance our discussion.
Only when the students understand what they want to say will the AI come back to help them. This time as an editor and critic.
I have students submit a chain of arguments to the AI. By doing so, the AI can identify gaps, suggest further reading, and complete the concepts you take out of the oven a little earlier.
In this way, the discussion is improved, but the thinking remains theirs.
where to draw the line
Even in classrooms like mine where AI is fully integrated, there are bound to be boundaries. AI cannot do the thinking for us. As teachers, we need to help our students avoid temptation.
When students feel pressured to achieve perfection, the temptation to leave the entire process to AI may become too strong to resist.
As I reflect on the essay I just received and the December 2022 essay, the lesson could not be clearer.
The best students are not the ones who avoid using AI. Rather, they are the ones who know when and where to stop using it.