A recent action by Will Teague, a history professor at Angelo State University in west Texas, felt more like counterintelligence than pedagogy. In his assignment instructions, he included invisible instructions in the form of white text in a one-point font. ChatGPT was instructed to write from a Marxist viewpoint by the hidden sentences. Students who copied the prompt into the chatbot received essays that were rife with allusions to dialectical materialism and class conflict. Thirty-three of the 122 papers that were submitted were clearly Marxist. Fourteen more students confessed after Teague revealed the trap in an email to his classes. The percentage of students who used AI to write their papers was close to 40%.
Although that figure is startling, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. Approximately 85% of undergraduates were already using AI for coursework in some capacity, such as brainstorming, outlining, or studying, according to a survey conducted last summer by Inside Higher Ed and the Generation Lab. About 25% of respondents acknowledged using AI to compose whole essays. The regulations governing their use are still a patchwork of departmental shrugs and individual curricula, despite the fact that the tools are widely available and frequently supplied by the institutions themselves. AI may not be handled in the same way in every classroom at the same university.
A bizarre, improvised landscape has been produced by that void. Dan Cryer, an English professor at Johnson County Community College outside of Kansas City, spent a sabbatical researching generative AI and came to the conclusion that teachers should use it as little as possible. His comparison sticks in your memory. He compares using AI to write a college essay to bringing a forklift to the gym. Yes, the weights are moved. However, the muscles do not grow. Nowadays, Cryer spends a lot of class time convincing students that the writing process itself, rather than the final product, is what truly educates them. This includes struggling with sources, developing arguments, and facing confusion. He informs them that society doesn’t require more college essays. Better thinkers are needed.
Cryer seems to be swimming against a powerful current. Students are left navigating a gray area that no one has bothered to define precisely while the tools continue to advance and the institutional guidance is still ambiguous. Some academics completely prohibit AI from being included in their curricula. Others support it. Many remain silent, leaving students to speculate about the boundary between resourcefulness and dishonesty. A recent Nation Fund report cited a student who succinctly described the confusion: no one appears to be coordinating, and different professors in the same department hold opposing views.
In the meantime, a pilot study at Kennesaw State University has attempted to see past the fear and comprehend what students actually do when they sit down to write with AI at their disposal. Twenty undergraduates were asked to write essays while thinking aloud, and the recordings were then examined by researchers. What they discovered was more complex than the story of cheating implies. Initially, students primarily used AI to generate ideas and overcome blank-page paralysis before drafting on their own. Many changed or rejected the AI’s output completely, viewing the chatbot more as an untrustworthy brainstorming partner than as a ghostwriter. The dynamic, according to one student, is like a loop: the AI rewrites what they give it, and then they rewrite the AI’s version, claiming ownership through revision.
However, subtlety does not equate to clear policy, and the lack of institutional clarity has left dissatisfaction simmering on both sides of the lectern. This spring, at graduation ceremonies around the nation, that annoyance exploded. A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was jeered by students when he referred to artificial intelligence as “the next Industrial Revolution.” When former Google CEO Eric Schmidt brought up artificial intelligence architects at the University of Arizona, he was met with audible jeers.
A record executive at Middle Tennessee State who praised artificial intelligence’s contribution to music production received the same treatment. The videos went viral and were seen by some as evidence that young people hate AI, but the truth is probably more nuanced. The jeers may have been directed less at the technology itself and more at the people onstage who appeared to be cheerfully selling a future that felt like a threat, given that they were graduating into a labor market already being reshaped by automation, carrying heavy debt, and witnessing their own professors struggle to explain what AI means for learning.
It’s becoming evident that since there isn’t yet a coherent response to AI, higher education hasn’t produced one. Teague and other professors set traps. Philosophical arguments are made by professors such as Cryer. Kennesaw researchers attempt to see what’s truly going on. And students continue to make their own quiet decisions, one assignment at a time, caught between tools that promise efficiency and an educational system still figuring out what it values. It remains to be seen if those choices result in something more akin to learned helplessness or something more akin to wisdom.
