Use your brain not AI

Proud cheaters using artificial intelligence to complete their coursework rather than doing it themselves. Artificial bot “students” running AI to compose their discussion posts. Students fumbling over words they can’t pronounce in their PowerPoint presentations because they’ve never actually used those words before.

As a student, I have personally suffered from how AI has infected higher education. Instead of refusing to use this demon tool — you know, like in favor of actually learning in the classes you paid for — students largely have embraced it. What’s worse, educators have drunk the Kool-Aid too.

Supposedly, this software tool can help students with personalized learning or professors with creating course content but let’s be real: students and educators are using AI software as a replacement for thinking. Either you are developing your cognitive skills or you are not. There’s no substitution for human creative thinking.

This, somehow, is not a popular opinion at colleges, even our own.

Santa Ana College’s School of Continuing Education and Community Services has been offering classes to students and the community on how to use Chat GPT and GenAI in writing or in the classroom because, you know, “it’s the future.”

California’s Department of Education is encouraging and implementing AI tools into K-12 education so that students can be prepared to use AI in their future careers and education.

The CDE also emphasizes the importance of ethical and moral mindsets that students must have when using AI to understand that some uses may be harmful.

How cute…but an “AI curriculum” is not going to stop millions of college students from using these apps freely and without guilt. The ethical solution here isn’t as simple as returning a shopping cart at Trader Joe’s.

I am tired of new AI apps that are slowly being embedded into every category of society from healthcare to art. Enough is enough. Stop pretending that students are using AI for anything other than cheating and that is a huge problem. Need some more proof? I’ve never met a student who has talked about using AI for research or pulling information from data sheets. Instead, I’ve had to endure wanna-be tech bros and others bragging about how they simply loaded their assignments into ChatGPT and submitted them.

Don’t even get me started on what this “tool” has done to group projects. Too many times I have been stuck with that Gen Alpha slang-loving, Chat GPT-dependent student who contributes some generated unverified lies to the group and I have to end up doing all or most of the project by myself. I can complain and whine, but professors are more accommodating to cheaters than those suffering with them.

Professors would rather tell me I have to improve my teamwork skills.

Even if there were some magical way of making AI use ethical, you can’t build on the knowledge that AI did for you. Foundational concepts of learning are being skipped, and I am already observing the gap between those who do their own work and those who don’t.

As a tutor in 2025, many of my students have glassy eyes and blank stares over Zoom when they don’t understand basic math equations or language learning skills like grammar and phonetics. This wasn’t always the case.

Instead of using AI bots, students should be going to the library for tutoring sessions like our millennial ancestors did. Where did the focus on the basics go?

Students are afraid to learn from their mistakes and think step by step. It’s okay to be wrong; how else do you learn?

Not everything AI produces is factually correct, and applications like ChatGPT, OpenAI or Photomath are continuously used as easy shortcuts.

And it’s not just the students who are getting lazy. Peers of mine have almost received failing grades because professors use Turnitin (an AI detecting AI software) to determine plagiarism and it falsely flags and doesn’t question the work itself or take into account the student’s ability.

Students and professors alike are blindly trusting in AI.

It’s almost impossible not to cheat with how normalized AI has become. I’m scared for the future generation’s education, creative thinking and individual thought.

This may sound more like a rant than a solution. But hey, at least I wrote it myself.