What Happens When Students Stop Believing Their Work Matters
A maxim I’ve oft repeated for our AI era is that if a task can be automated, then it will. If that is true, why then, with free and ubiquitous AI, do I still have a large number of students who submit nothing? AI is a crisis in higher education and in many other areas of our world, but just because someone can now automate part of their life, doesn’t mean they’re going to use AI to do it. In fact, the very existence of machine intelligence might cause students to check out and decide there’s little point in doing anything. There’s a much deeper wound here that we’re only now beginning to see. When a machine can now mimic the work of a human being, many of us, especially students, must be asking what the point is anymore. That’s a much more dangerous and slippery problem than students submitting AI-generated work.
The Students Left Behind in the AI Panic
Last May, I wrote about a student of mine named Drew (not his real name) and how he never submitted anything the entire semester. I never got to the bottom of why he didn’t submit work, but I have a strong and growing suspicion that part of it had to do with a crisis of purpose brought on in part because of AI:
Drew came to each class meeting and sat right in front of me in the first row. He was eager to learn about all things AI. He contributed to every class discussion, asked insightful questions, and challenged and engaged his peers with an amazing level of thoughtfulness. But Drew never submitted any of the assignments for the course. Not a single one. Not the assignments that invited him to use AI, and none of those assignments that required him not to.
I met with him after class, spoke with him in a private conference in my office, and issued alerts for student support services, but nothing I did helped Drew be successful in my class. Sadly, Drew’s story isn’t an outlier. In fact, his story has become increasingly common. Students show up and attend class, but don’t actually submit any of the required coursework. No one fully understands the phenomenon, and while it certainly has gotten worse since the pandemic, it isn’t exactly new.
Students are struggling with articulating and actualizing purpose now in ways that I’ve not seen before. Part of that may have to do with the generational challenges of the pandemic, increased screen time, but I also think AI is a culprit.
I start with Drew’s story here because with AI agents, the perception is now that anyone can automate many of the tasks we do each day, and I think some assume that this will be the norm. That could be the case. However, it may also cause quite a few students and maybe even faculty to ask what the purpose of education is now and simply not do anything as a result.
I was interviewed by Lila Schroff from the Atlantic about Is Schoolwork Optional Now? about the existential threat AI poses to purpose. For me, and many others, AI represents more than a task completion machine. I described a scenario that haunts me: using an AI agent to grade a full set of student essays in the fifteen minutes it takes me to walk across campus for a coffee. The grading that would otherwise take ten or twelve hours is now done before I'm back at my desk, with personalized feedback already sent to each student. It can save teachers enormous time. But in the process, it hollows out the relationship between students and teachers that is at the core to what education actually is.
Few think this situation is ideal. Later in the article, Natalie Lahr, a sophomore at Barnard, describes coming to the university writing center and, instead of getting personalized feedback from a tutor, “that tutor copy-pasted her essay prompt into the popular AI tool Perplexity and gave Lahr the AI-generated outline. “That was basically the end of our session,” Lahr said. “I had a crashout about that afterwards because I was like, Why am I even here?’”
Why am I even here? is the refrain many students likely have been asking and it is the question we need to help them answer.
A Crisis of Not Doing
It’s easy to dismiss lazy students or burned-out teachers turning to AI, as many seem to do in the comment sections of social media posts, where we hear a litany of solutions from folks that range from bluebooks to oral exams to entire technology bans. But AI isn’t simply a crisis in assessment. No, the true crisis here is purpose. Analog assessment techniques are labor-intensive and don’t address the seemingly endless use cases students turn to when using AI outside of a proctored assessment. It also doesn’t begin to consider the material conditions present that would draw teachers to use AI to grade. We have to start considering those material and philosophical ramifications for what machine intelligence represents to our world. If a student already feels unconfident in their abilities, terrified of the blank page, then the anxiety of machine-generated “perfection” must be a staggering psychological barrier that some students likely don’t see the point in confronting or doing much of anything as a result.
The most galling thing is that you don’t have to use AI to still question if your skills matter. You see it in advertising, watch your peers do their homework with it, listen to your professors talk about resisting AI or giving you demonstrations about how to use it, all the while you ask the fundamental question about what is the point anymore?
A Challenge Beyond Academia
AI isn’t just forcing students and faculty to question the purpose of education. Even some of the largest religions in the world are starting to see AI usage as a potential problem. A few months ago, the Pope implored Catholic priests to stop using AI:
Priests should resist “the temptation to prepare homilies with artificial intelligence.”
That should make everyone within the AI education discourse pause and consider just how big a challenge this technology poses to purpose and meaning-making. If the Pope has to tell priests to stop using AI to prepare some of the most spiritually intimate messages, then we need to seriously consider if AI usage among students and faculty transcends academic policies and reexamine our assumptions about why people might turn to use AI. The very notion that a parishioner may be moved or have their faith reaffirmed because of a chatbot runs counter to the mission of the Catholic Church bridging human and divine experiences. Still, it is happening. And the more people that continually question that AI cannot do x, call it a bullshit machine, decry that it knows nothing, claim that it cannot replace a human being, miss the reality of our moment. AI is being used as a stand in for human knowledge and judgement. AI is persuading people through text, image, video, music, and code that it is smart, artistic, and capable.
Our students see this, even if they don’t use AI. They absorb the noise around them and have to wrestle with what AI means. Talk to them about it. Let them know that they do have value and that there’s more to life than the efficiency offered by machine intelligence. A college education should be a lived experience, not one of isolation behind a screen or a series of transactional courses that lead to meaningless certifications. Some students and faculty have to navigate that in online courses—I’m one of them! Try to offer them embodied moments (live meetings, in-person meetups, personal check-ins). Don’t let an online course be on autopilot for them or for you.
But I want to be honest about what those gestures can and cannot do. An entire generation is now coming of age in a time where they don’t have to do the work, where their teachers and bosses and future colleagues can outsource parts of their thinking. If college and possibly education as a whole are indeed now optional, then we need to work on making it clear to students that it is an option worth their time. There is value and worth in pursuing a life where their ideas matter, where their thinking is judged more than a series of tasks they perform each week. I don’t want to continue to see students like Drew quietly drop our courses or submit nothing because they have started to question and possibly despair about what their overall value is now that machines can automate our lives.
Very nicely said
GREAT POST - raising several issues that I haven’t read about before!!
Such a different take to the laziness view that many (maybe half) teachers seem to have - while the other half seem to “stick their heads in the sand”…
THANK YOU SO MUCH! 👍♥️