On Oct. 4, senior Arianna De La Cruz wrote an opinion piece in The Sandspur, “Everybody Loves Chat,” questioning the usage of AI in Rollins’ curricula. Her argument is that replacing the messy, difficult struggle of drafting and thinking with automated AI tools flattens authentic student voice, deepens inequities, and reduces a liberal arts education to transactional task execution.
I agree with all of the above, if you use AI incorrectly. And in her examples, she is right. A professor who asks ChatGPT to generate your title or reorganize your paragraphs is handing you the first idea. That is not teaching. However, AI is a comet that is heading towards higher education, and there is nothing stopping it. Students will use it and we faculty have no say in that. We can stop it in our classes, which I don’t recommend, but we definitely can’t stop students from using it in their homes.
The fact is that students are using it, and the numbers are staggering: according to Library Journal, a Clarivate survey found that 95% of college and university students now use AI for assignments and projects, up from 45% in 2024. I need to correct myself; the comet is right above our heads. The question remains whether students are using or abusing it. I’m leaning towards the latter, and that is why we need to teach our students the proper ways of using it.
That is the dilemma. Faculty and students are trapped between two easy options. The first is denial: ban it, ignore it, don’t look up. The second is surrender: let the machine think for you. The only path that works is harder than either. Keep the struggle, and use the tool as a critic, not a ghostwriter. You can still start a blank page, write the first paragraph, and then ask the AI to criticize it instead of asking the AI to write it. You can also ignore the AI criticism and stick to your original thoughts. Or you can take that criticism and build something new out of it, shaped by your thoughts. The possibilities are endless, and creativity is boundless. The first idea stays yours. The machine just argues with you. Learning does not stop in class. If the professor is asking you to use AI, go ahead and use it. When you go back home, you can continue your learning without it.
Unfortunately, this is some professors’ dream of how a perfect world would be. In reality, AI is becoming a culture war that is unending, where it should not be. On one hand, we have President Orlean and her supporters carrying signs that say “Don’t Look Up,” and on the other side we have those who replaced their humanities with AI prompts celebrating their demise by this comet. Denial on one side, surrender on the other, and the hard middle sits empty. We faculty are standing there watching this insanity unfold with our jaws dropped. God help us all.
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