(TNS) – Lloydia Anderson listened to common complaints among many students of her age. There's not much time to accomplish something.
Between several juggling jobs and people who prioritize certain classes to get free time, Anderson said he'd heard other students at Central Connecticut State discuss using chat grit to complete assignments.
“Some people use it for time management, while others don't think the allocation is important,” she said, explaining the indifference of some students to the increased role in education.
Anderson said she was intentionally not using ChatGpt for fear that it would reduce her ability to think. She is equally concerned that her future work will be replaced by AI. CCSU junior Anderson studies sociology and philosophy and hopes to advance to a higher level of education.
AI is changing the landscape of higher education to ensure that professors change their curriculum and testing methods to ensure that students rely on their own thinking rather than AI. Several professors at CCSU who spoke with Courant shared how AI fears cognitive decline and reliance on technology to complete tasks. But concerns go beyond students finding shortcuts to getting to work. This means that students will no longer be able to think critically or perform the simplest tasks without technical assistance.
On the same scale, AI education experts say AI doesn't go anywhere and say it's the educator's responsibility to be taught students to use it ethically and responsibly – creating ways to leverage its use to promote learning, rather than replacing the brain's cognitive thinking skills.
Same assignment, quoting error
In the summer, Professor Audraking, who teaches online classes that require students to connect course materials to pop culture themes, used the same terms and ideas to discover that three of the student essays were essentially identical, he knew something was just right.
King determined that a student who didn't know each other used ChatGpt.
“A lot of students and I would like to have faculty members also prompt in ChatGpt and spew the answer,” King said. “It makes things difficult. They're already losing attention. They have low critical thinking skills.”
Also, in some cases, the credibility of ChatGpt remains a problem.
Brian Matzke, Digital Humanities Librarian at Elihu Burritt Library, said he comes to the research desk once every few weeks looking for specific articles listed by the student, but none of them can be found because they do not exist.
Ricardo Freis, an assistant professor of philosophy, said ChatGpt “reproduces linguistic patterns that contain actual and inaccurate citations.”
“It replicates a lot of bias that goes into it,” Millis said. “It takes from the corpus of knowledge and recreates what is said.”
Vahid Behzadan is an associate professor of computer and data science at New Haven University and is co-founder of the Connecticut AI Alliance, a consortium of 21 universities, industrial action groups and state communities. “It's not just stringing words together, you can follow the prompts in some consistent paragraphs, and you can shift smoothly across subjects and styles,” Chatgpt said.
“It means demonstrating not only a strong command of language, but a practical grasp of common sense and specialized knowledge,” he said.
Cognitive decline
Several studies have emerged that correlate the use of ChatGPT with cognitive decline.
The MIT study published this June included 54 participants assigned to three groups. LLM (Language Generation AI) groups using ChatGPT, Google Search Engine, not a third at all. Participants had to write an essay.
In this study, brain activity of participants was recorded using EEG, according to information about the study.
A study measuring brain activity for four months found that “LLM users consistently suffer from poor performance at neural, language and behavioral levels.”
“These results raise concerns about the long-term educational impact of LLM reliance and highlight the need to explore the role of AI in learning more deeply,” the study states.
Another study from a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in 2024 found that “Turkey high school students who have access to ChatGPT while practicing mathematics problems got worse on mathematics tests compared to students who have no access to ChatGPT,” according to the Hekinger Report.
Behzadan said research is limited and as chatbot use evolves, research is still in its early stages. In August, ChatGpt had 700 million users. This is a quadruple number over the past year.
He highlighted the importance of cognitive fit that provides long-term benefits such as general health, happiness and quality of life.
Tomas Portillo, a junior at CCSU who studies mathematics and philosophy, said that his research does not use AI. However, many students are more dependent on it and want to seek help from ChatGpt than from professors.
King has been teaching philosophy for 17 years and has seen how students approach the tasks.
“There are few students who think abstractly,” she said. Many years ago, students explained that they would come to class because they had read and asked questions as assigned articles.
“There's less engagement and less feedback,” she said. “What completely lost and disappeared when we rely on ChatGpt is humanity, originality and personality.”
Matsuke said that AI itself is not what he calls his main concern.
“If the concept of AI technology appears in a world where critical thinking and the humanities are already evaluating, it would be a great opportunity, but it amplifies many existing issues.”
Work and exhausted
King said today's students are overworked and exhausted by juggling many priorities.
“They don't have the time, they don't have the energy,” she said. “We are in the perfect storm of capitalism, and there are also issues with the scope of attention. Tiktok and social media have become more likely to rely on external sources.”
Matzke said students are very results-oriented and good at writing in a style that regurgitates facts and points out bullets.
“However, it is much more difficult to try to identify the relationship between the concept and the way X leads to Y,” he said.
Portillo said that although his research does not use AI, it does not seem to escape as it spreads across social media and algorithms in many aspects of everyday life.
“I feel that all of this access to technology makes people more self-centered,” he said. “Social media seems like a medium between us that adds a layer of obfuscation.”
He also recalled how AI changed the way classes were structured. Several professors said they needed to change the curriculum and essays and quizzes in class.
“There are so many more challenges in the class,” Anderson said.
Misunderstandings of AI
Fleis teaches philosophy, research and writing courses to teach research and writing in a world where AI claims to be better at doing those things than humans.
“I don't think they're using AI,” he said. “Writing is your thoughts and they don't know that they're offloading their ideas. That's hard to talk about.”
Fleis said the goal of his class is “to become a powerful researcher and writer by studying AI, experimenting with it, and thinking critically about how it affects society.”
In today's society, students said they feel pressured to spend their time on what is most relevant to their work, assuming that “writing is not essential, you don't have to do it, you need to suffer through it.”
ai stays here
When ChatGpt first became a major university in 2022, many universities sought to ban the use of AI, according to Behzadan. But that backfired.
“Everyone is going to use it, whether you ban it or not,” said Behzadan, “that's inevitable.”
Behzadan said he is trying to develop guidelines for the ethical use of AI, including citing AI when it is used.
As AI is not disappearing anytime soon, students said they need to learn how to use AI to adapt to changing skills and job requirements.
“AI will stay here,” he said. “It will become more sophisticated and we will need to coordinate and evolve the curriculum to adopt AI, but it will enable students to make useful and ethical use of AI technology.”
Milling said the key is “teaching you as a tool to help you, not something you think for you.”
King said she is worried about the future and the ongoing emergence of AI.
“As more students rely on technology, if they can think for them, they will be less likely to connect and develop those emotional connections in the real world,” she said.
©2025 Hartford Courant. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
