Senior Columnist Ananya Shah asserts that the rise of AI is leading to the intellectual demise of society.
Credit: Sydney CurranWe’ve stopped thinking for ourselves. Everywhere I look — in classrooms, in conversations, in the way we form opinions — there’s been a subtle but undeniable shift. No one raises a hand in a seminar without first running the text through ChatGPT to uncover its “true” meaning. Discussions aren’t about original ideas anymore; they’re about who can paraphrase artificial intelligence the fastest. Why wrestle with course readings when a machine can condense them for you in seconds? Why struggle through a problem set when AI can spoon-feed you the solution?
The most common response to confusion in college isn’t to ask a professor, consult a TA, or even just sit with the discomfort of not knowing. It’s to “ChatGPT it.” Somehow, an algorithm has become more valuable than the people who spent decades mastering their fields. Makes sense.
OpenAI claims its mission is to benefit humanity. But is it? Instead of making us sharper, AI has made us intellectually complacent. College students don’t grapple with ideas anymore — we copy, paste, and call it “critical thinking.” Professors urge us to engage deeply with the material, but AI offers a shortcut: a surface-level answer, polished enough to pass as genuine insight. And we take it, no questions asked.
Beyond the classroom, the dependence runs just as deep. People ask AI all sorts of bizarre things: how to text back a crush, what to caption their Instagram post, whether there are more wheels or doors in the world. It’s amusing until you realize what’s at stake. Creativity, originality, the messy but necessary process of forming thoughts on our own — all of these are eroding and being replaced by algorithmic convenience. Our ideas are no longer ours; they’re cookie-cutter, stripped of any real thought.
To be clear, I think that AI is an extraordinary tool. It has the power to revolutionize industries, streamline research, and improve our lives. For students specifically, it can generate study guides, create flashcards, and help break down complex topics, which all make learning more accessible.
But what happens when we lean on it so much that we forget how to think? At the end of the day, AI is human-made. It does not possess wisdom, intuition, or moral judgment. It cannot innovate like human curiosity can. Yet, we increasingly allow it to make decisions for us, to do the intellectual heavy lifting we should be struggling through ourselves.
College students, in particular, are its biggest casualties.
I won’t pretend to be above this issue — I’ve used AI in situations where it wasn’t necessary, or sometimes much more than I should have.
But if we outsource all of our learning, why are we even at Penn? The whole point of college is to engage with difficult material, to push through uncertainty, and to learn how to think.
There’s a kind of intellectual pride in figuring something out on your own, a confidence AI can never replicate. And yet, if I took a quick walk through Fisher Fine Arts Library, I’d probably see more ChatGPT tabs open than actual readings.
The irony is glaring: The more we use AI, the smarter it gets — and the worse we become at thinking for ourselves. We let it read, write, and analyze, and in doing so, we surrender the very skills that make us human. Critical thinking isn’t about churning out a 500-word discussion post in record time without opening the assigned reading. It’s about wrestling with ideas, forming perspectives, and challenging assumptions. If we don’t push back against this growing dependency, we risk becoming a generation that doesn’t think, only echoes.
Before long, our vocabulary will shrink to AI’s favorite buzzwords: “delve,” “underscore,” “tapestry.” Maybe it’s time to close the tab. To sit with a difficult question. To struggle with an idea. To form an opinion that hasn’t been pre-approved by an algorithm.
Because if we don’t, one day we may wake up and realize our thoughts were never truly our own.
ANANYA SHAH is a College first year studying philosophy, politics, and economics from Bonaire, GA. Her email is aoshah@sas.upenn.edu.
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