Four years ago, if you had told me that I would be adding language to my syllabus regarding students’ use of AI, I would not have believed you. At the time, I probably did not fully understand the direction AI was going in nor how it was rapidly starting to revolutionize how students learn and how I teach psychology courses.

I recently created an online asynchronous course and I received substantial feedback on how to “AI-proof assignments” in light of the crafty ways some students may use AI to bypass the intellectual rigor of course assignments. In that course, instead of students simply writing and submitting a paper (which is vulnerable to uses of AI), they must complete the paper in several different parts, requiring them to demonstrate their learning process. Ensuring that students are appropriately challenged in the era of generative AI has become my second full-time job.

As a psychology professor and licensed psychologist, what’s even more concerning is the risk of “cognitive stunting.” When young people, who are still learning how to master certain skills (e.g., summarizing text), decide to “outsource” these skills to AI, they are “shortcutting the process of developing those skills in the first place,” explains Rebecca Winthrop in a piece published by the Brookings Institute. The concerns are even greater for children and adolescents. They simply do not possess the cognitive reserve to offload these cognitive tasks, so the skill never gets developed.

Now, we’re facing an uncanny set of events with the proliferation of generative AI in all facets of life, which is being met with a mixture of pushback, acceptance, skepticism, and wonder. New........

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