Students across the country are using AI models to complete assignments and write entire essays. Some of this constitutes cheating, but in many cases schools are allowing students to make some use of AI tools.

This is a slippery slop. As some experts argue, any intrusion of automation into the writing process isn’t just threatening students’ composition skills, but their entire ability to think.

“Writing is a technology for thinking,” cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg told the New York Times in a new essay mulling the consequences of sidestepping the hard work of writing.

Writing, the piece notes, helps develop all sorts of cognitive faculties, including building our working memory, executive planning skills, and our metacognition, or the ability to be aware of your own thinking.

For all the romanticism around writing, it’s also a form of drudgery. Kellogg says that drafting a basic essay is as mentally taxing as digging a ditch is physically exhausting. You have to really rack your brain to find the right word and organize ideas in a way that makes sense to a broader audience. When they’re manifested in the real world, you revise your ideas by going over them yourself or asking for feedback.

Writing, in other words, is inextricable from the labor that goes into it. And so when you bring in a piece of machinery that offers to do the process for you, it’s no longer writing, and by no extension, no longer exercising the brain. 

An MIT study earlier this year found that people who used AI while they wrote an essay showed lower brain activity compared to people who didn’t. Moreover, the people who composed with AI struggled to remember a single line from the essays they just produced, with their brain activity staying at a reduced level even when they were later asked to write again without an AI’s help.

As the NYT piece notes, though, few people would willingly dig a ditch, and the same goes for writing. But there’s no part of the writing process than can be offloaded to an AI without some cost, warned Steve Graham, a writing expert and educational psychologist at Arizona State University.

Building off that warning, the NYT‘s Dana Goldstein pondered: “If writing is thinking, then any part of the struggle that is outsourced to technology amounts to relinquishing some freedom to perceive. How will students ever know what they really think of anything — whether it’s ‘The Crucible’ or AI itself — if they ask a machine to spit out an answer for them?”

Schools and colleges are grappling with how to rein in students’ use of the tech. Some are returning to using pencil and paper to write essays and oral exams. Others are banning digital devices in freshman courses, and Ivy League schools like Princeton University have dropped Honor Code traditions that let students take tests and exams unsupervised.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that many students have to come to realize on their own that using AI to write an analysis of, for example, assigned literature, is robbing them of their own education.

“You’re not strengthening that muscle by actually analyzing these really hard texts,” a college junior told the NYT. “They’re meant to be hard.”

More on education: College Kids Are Using AI Agents to “Take” Entire Online Classes for Them by Logging Directly Into the Course Management Software