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What If Students Are Sick of AI Too?

A generation raised on the technology is discovering there are shortcuts it doesn’t want to take

“The number of targeted AI ads I get as a student is really insane,” Eden Daniel told me over coffee. Every time she opened YouTube, she was hit with a barrage of offers to take shortcuts on her schoolwork, especially during midterms.

Daniel has a visceral aversion to the technology, framing it as plague on society that enriches tech billionaires and destroys the environment. Enrolled in the English honours program at McGill University, she saw her position as fairly typical, at least in her department. “We all understand the threat of AI to our jobs and what we’re doing, so it feels almost like a professional betrayal of our own futures.” If her peers were using online tools for proofreading, they had the good sense to hide it, lest they be socially shamed.

Daniel is a perfect example of what the Chronicle of Higher Education labels “the student AI resistors”—young people who refuse to be spoon-fed and want a rigorous education. In fact, when the news broke about graduates in the United States booing commencement speakers who praised artificial intelligence, Daniel texted me to make sure I saw the story.

Last December, I wrote about the split among professors surrounding AI. As a college literature teacher, I try to keep these tools out of the classroom, while some of my colleagues focus on modelling proper use. But I’ve since realized that my own understanding was incomplete. I had been looking at AI largely through the eyes of a teacher whose profession was being upended. For my students, the disruption runs deeper: the technology has wrenched their entire educational trajectory off course.

In these new waters, I couldn’t tell whether we were allies or enemies. This past semester, I taught a creative writing course where the majority claimed to hate AI Reading their reflections on break-ups and dying grandparents felt like a privilege. Then I dragged myself to a second class where I caught teenagers uploading ten-page short stories to ChatGPT to avoid reading them. Had education really become this much of a charade?

There have always been keeners and cheaters, and creative writing classes are easy sells. But the more I talked to people from Daniel’s generation, the more I realized that her peers are in an unnerving position. The academic norms have crumbled around them, and the new ones have not yet arrived. Torn between their values and their pragmatism, the desire to improve themselves and the fear of being left behind, they’re arguing with each other about AI even more than the faculty are. And, in the end, their debate is what might ultimately shape what education becomes.

Of the dozen students I interviewed in the Montreal area, a full half were anti-AI. Eighteen-year-old Chloé Thibault framed her stance as part of her commitment to counterculture: she dyes her hair bright colours, goes to alternative rock shows, and sees the act of creation as “very human, very raw, almost messy.”

A strong student who is eyeing a career in politics or law, Thibault was the most vocal proponent of the joys of being challenged. “Obviously, failing and struggling is not fun, but the sense of pride and succeeding afterwards is very, very motivating for me. And I don’t think you’d get that same kick or that same hit from getting a ninety from ChatGPT versus........

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