Why You Should Not Use AI to Do Your Schoolwork
Image Courtesy of The Catholic University of America
By Dr. Michael Gorman
AI seems to be everywhere now. It’s too early to say how big a difference it will make for our lives in the long run, for good or for ill, but this little essay isn’t about any of that. It’s about why you should not use AI in your schoolwork.
What is schoolwork for? What is the point of doing problem sets or writing term papers? Professors don’t ask students to do problem sets because they need help in finding the answers to problems. Professors don’t ask students to write term papers because they themselves don’t understand Plato but are hoping that the students do. Student work isn’t valuable in that way. In fact—please don’t be offended—professors almost never benefit from reading the work that students do.
If student work isn’t there to help professors, then what is it for? It’s there to help students! Assuming the assignments are well-designed, students learn a lot by doing them (and by getting good feedback). Students get better at chemistry by balancing equations, they get better at understanding poetry by analyzing the meter, and so on. And—this is the central point—the benefit comes from the process of producing the work. It’s like practicing the piano or going to the gym: the fact that the notes get played, or the weights go up and down, isn’t really what’s important. After all, you could get the notes played by turning on a recording, and you could get the weights to go up and down by using a forklift. The value of practicing the piano, or going to the gym, is that your own powers—your musicality, your strength—are improved by doing something hard.
If you use AI to summarize a reading, rather than struggling with the reading yourself, you will learn less, and possibly even nothing. If you use AI to write a paper or solve an equation, you will learn less, and possibly even nothing. In short, the point of school would be lost. Just as going to the gym is for making your body strong, going to college is for making your mind strong. Sure, it’s hard, tiring, and boring. Sometimes it hurts. But we all know the slogan: no pain, no gain.
Some will object that in the future of work, AI use will be mandatory, and those who don’t know how to use AI will be left behind. Whether this is true or not, it doesn’t mean you should be using AI in school. Why? Because only people who are already smart and knowledgeable can use AI to create real value. You can use AI to write code, but unless you know how to code, you can’t check the code or fix it. You can use AI to develop a policy argument, but you won’t know whether the argument is good or bad unless you are already good at assessing policies. So even if AI can be a powerful tool, it only works for someone who already has a powerful mind—which means someone who didn’t go through school using AI. (All those older people telling you what a great tool AI is are people who went through school before the AI revolution.) If you use AI instead of doing your schoolwork, your mind will grow weak. You won’t end up being the person using AI on the job; rather, you’ll be the person who has no job because you got replaced by AI.
But what if AI replaces everyone’s job, and we all stay home and live off a Universal Basic Income? Won’t you be glad then that you didn’t go through all that suffering in college? It depends on the kind of life you want to live. Some people might think the goal is to spend one’s days doomscrolling while drunk. People like that will definitely want to do as little college work as possible. But surely that is not the right goal. Surely it’s better to be a person who contemplates truth and beauty, and acts for the good. To become that person, you need to develop your capacities as much as possible: because only you can live your life. No AI, no matter how powerful, will ever be able to live your life for you. College gives you a fantastic chance to develop your capacities for living—perhaps the last, best chance you will ever have.
