[Maximilian Milovidov is a freshman at Columbia University and a member of TikTok’s Youth Council. He used a large language model to edit this essay for length and a human to edit for content. This piece also appeared in the Body Electric newsletter. Sign up here for a biweekly guide to move more and doomscroll less.]
Last fall, I attended a reading session on campus. of new yorker In the article “What Happens After AI Disrupts Academic Writing?” In the audience discussion that followed, I shared something that elicited an unexpected laugh. The course I was taking called “Writing AI” may be the only course on campus where artificial intelligence is not banned; Required. This “AI first” lesson was a living thought experiment about what would happen if we taught students to use AI critically, rather than ignoring it or assuming they were using it to cheat.
Just as past generations were unable to prevent the spread of the printing press, which has been widely denounced as a threat to scholarship, we believe that our choice is not “AI or no AI.” Children born today will never know a world without AI. The majority of U.S. teens are already using AI chatbots, and more than half rely on them for school work. Students will reach for these tools whether their universities prohibit them or not.
Maximilian Milovidov
Maximilian Milovidov
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Maximilian Milovidov
A common concern is that generative AI will encourage people to outsource their thinking to machines, thereby reducing comprehension, known as “cognitive offloading.” Throughout the course, I realized that this concern only matters if the AI is treated like an omniscient oracle. Encouraging students to experiment with and critique large-scale language models (LLMs) makes AI an on-demand learning partner with both advantages and disadvantages. At least it’s a sounding board. At best, it’s a viable alternative to teaching assistants and tutors.
We brought our ideas and outlines to class. We entered the draft into the chatbot, documented the proposal, and explained why we approved or rejected it. We started with our own inspiration, discussions, and sparks of thought, but we learned how to prompt chatbots to uncover gaps in reasoning or find invisible connections. My professor called this the “friend test.” Ask your friends for feedback on your paper, but don’t let them write your paper.
Research shows that using AI as a collaborator for feedback, iteration, and ideation can complement education. One study found that students who used moderate AI support during lectures performed better than both students who used fully automated help and students who used minimal support. When used in moderation, AI can improve human cognitive performance.
AI can also level the uneven playing field in academia. For many students who don’t have access to a tutor, chatbots can generate practice questions, practice tests, and flashcards. Give feedback on the paragraph. or propose a counterargument. The “Learn Mode” feature allows LLMs to guide students to answers instead of handing them to them, like a good TA. A 2025 Harvard University study found that students who used an AI tutor learned more than twice as well and felt more engaged than students in a traditional classroom.
The fact that these systems are trained on biased, Western-centric data is precisely why students must learn to question them. When you input a draft into the model, it doesn’t magically return A+ prose. More often, it came back to us amplifying our weaknesses. Vague claims remained vague and filler words were spread, often perceived as impersonal and institutional.
The chatbot version of the essay was so horribly bland that I sometimes felt oddly proud of my messy, incomplete paragraphs. These moments taught me more about my own writing process than a closed book or an essay in class. If anyone can write a passing paragraph, what separates us is not whether we can write text, but whether we can think, judge, and revise it.
In my “Writing AI” class, I decided to explore the appropriate uses of AI in academia. But in reality, we’ve learned how to be thoughtful about why we reach for tools, what we hope to get out of them, and what we’re giving up in the process. It provided a platform to openly discuss our relationship with the technologies that define our generation, without fear of embarrassment or punishment. It’s notable in the context of campus-wide “AI shaming” that routinely pushes student use underground.
These skills will be important even after graduation. AI has the potential to automate entry-level jobs, making it even more important that we learn how to work with these systems. We cannot control what kind of job market we participate in, but we can demand that our education equips us to take advantage of this technology, rather than hopelessly enduring it.
This essay was written by Maximilian Milovidov and edited by Phoebe Lett.
You can hear more about Milovidov and why he resents being called a member of the “anxious generation.” TED Radio Hourepisode “Did social media destroy a generation, or just change one?”
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