Generic AI is the act of robbing students of critical thinking and passing more skills to more power than how knowledge is produced.
This is a warning from Kimberly Hardcastle, assistant professor of business and marketing at Northumbria University.
In a conversation article, she argued that the university was distracted by plagiarism concerns, whilst missing out on deeper changes.
Students skip difficult parts
Hardcastle pointed to the human data behind Claude, analysing anonymized conversations of around 1 million people over the 18 days of April.
After filtering into 574,740 education-related chats associated with validated university email accounts, the company found that 39.3% of student interactions involve the creation or polishing of educational content, such as drafting essays, practices, or research summary. Another 33.5% asked Claude to solve the issue directly.
In doing so, students are delegating important parts of the learning process to machines, Hardcastle said.
“Students can produce sophisticated production without the cognitive journey traditionally required to create them,” she writes.
She said the risk is that students are beginning to validate ideas by how AI persuades them and explains them, rather than by their own independent analysis.
From learning to outsourcing to big technology
For centuries, education relied on teachers who guided students through troubling reasoning and discussion.
Generic AI is overturning it by generating immediate, authoritative answers that blur the line between original thinking and machine-assisted shortcuts, she said.
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Hardcastle called it an “intellectual revolution.” This is a black box algorithm that is trained with data that is not fully visible, and there is a risk of abandoning traditional skills such as measuring evidence or evaluating sources.
And he said who's controlling it that makes this shift even more amazing. A small number of high-tech companies own knowledge pipelines.
But that's not the first time, Hardcastle said. Social media is already attracting attention for profit.
However, this time Hardcastle warned that the stakes are higher. It's not just about what distracts us, it's about how we think.
“It risks empowering tech companies that produce generative AI tools on how knowledge is created,” she said.
Colleges can't sit in the back
Most universities respond to surface issues like catching plagiarism, tweaking ratings, teaching AI literacy, and more, but that's not enough, Hardcastle said.
The real job is to ensure pedagogy, not profit, and to define how AI is used.
But she highlighted some advances that are working to make educators take the lead, like the centres of responsible AI, including her own institutions.
But without intentional action, Big Tech could potentially determine what the next generation of knowledge will look like, she warned.
“Generative AI is more than just a sophisticated computer,” Hardcastle said. “It will change the way you understand knowledge.”
