I still remember the November when ChatGPT came out, and the exam period that followed.
As a professor at Harvard, I had B+ writers submitting essays withย em dashesย and Oxford commas, as if theyย had just signed with Penguin. Just as their writing magically improved, their voices began to blur into what we now call “AI slop.”
Yet, as one of the earliest victims of the AI slop tsunami, I refuse to give in to the Luddism that led institutions to shut the door on AI entirely.
Instead, I’ve chosen to invite AI into every corner of my classroom because anything less will soon feel like a dereliction of duty.
I think Gen Z needs to be taught to use AI responsibly
Every generation struggles with entering the workforce, but few have had it as hard as my Gen Z students. Reading the news, you would think their struggles boil down to a mixture between laziness and entitlement, forgetting that we have been blaming the youth for all that ails society since Aristotle.
In reality, they’re struggling because we’re asking them to excel at two things that are foreign to them at once.
Not only are they stepping into institutions without answer guides or gradebooks, but they’re doing so at a time when the tools no one is teaching them are redefining how the work itself gets done.
When AI is taking over the workplace, you don’t respond by pretending the tools don’t exist. You respond by teaching people how to use them well.
I now ask students to use AI in every assignment
The most important lesson I teach my undergrads is the same one I teach in my executive education classes: Use AI responsibly, with a personal growth mindset, not an output-oriented one.
I begin by asking my students not to lie to themselves about the kind of AI user they are becoming.
Are they centaurs, with half their essays spliced from ChatGPT, or cyborgs, with AI agents writing their emails while they sleep and automatically reviewing their Uber Eats orders?
Perhaps they’re artisans, clinging harder and harder to what little humanity is left in us?
Whichever route they choose, the practice of using AI for growth couldn’t be simpler.
There are some ground rules they have to follow
We begin by acknowledging one of AI’s greatest strengths: its ability to quickly synthesize across large bodies of knowledge and connect ideas across disparate silos. Students get comfortable with ChatGPT’s deep research, Perplexity’s searches across academic journals, and Gemini’s ability to poke holes in their arguments before typing a single word.
Should they find particularly challenging pieces, as they often do in my economics classes, they are allowed to use AI to help them “explain it like I’m five” and apply the insights directly, instead of getting a Ph.D. to understand what they found.
But when it comes to drafting the arguments themselves, my number one rule is that we put AI on pause. The goal is to capture their thinking in its rawest form and to give their thoughts a function before they obtain a form, even if it means leaning on voice notes to move our arguments along.
Only once my students know what they want to say, does AI return to help them, this time as an editor and a critic.
I ask students to submit their argument chains to AI so it can identify gaps, suggest further reading, and help finish concepts that were pulled from the oven a bit too soon.
This way, the argument improves, but the thinking remains theirs.
Where I draw the line
Even in a classroom where AI is as fully integrated as mine, this is where the boundary must lie. AI cannot do the thinking for us, and as teachers, we must help students avoid the temptation.
When students feel pressured to achieve perfection, the temptation to hand over the entire process to AI can become too strong to resist.
As I reflect on the essays I received now and those of December 2022, the lesson couldn’t be clearer.
The best students aren’t those who avoid using AI. Instead, they’re the ones who know when and where to stop using it.
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