I am old enough to have used — or tried to use — a slide rule in high school math, so I remember the kerfuffle over the emergence of handheld calculators. Oh, no, people exclaimed: kids won’t learn their times tables! Indeed, calculators and subsequent tech have changed what kids learn and how they do math. Every advancement in technology has impacted education, for both good and bad. Word processing and text analysis have transformed my own writing and the way I interacted with students’ writing for the better, even as it empowered students to plagiarize more easily — definitely a worse outcome.
My attitude toward emerging tech has always been to embrace what is useful even as I worked to limit any harm. Why, then, do I feel so threatened by the ubiquity of artificial intelligence. I believe the impact of this tech on learning is different. Calculators didn’t replace mathematical learning and processes; they just shifted the labor and focus. When students use AI to write, however, the only meaningful process they might engage is crafting a prompt, and that doesn’t require the deep thinking of crafting their own writing.
Gallup tells us that “The percentage of high school students who report using GenAI tools for schoolwork is growing, increasing from 79% to 84% between January and May 2025.” (https://newsroom.collegeboard.org) That percentage appears to be growing. More and more students use AI not as a tool for writing, but as a complete substitute for it.
What are those students sacrificing? What does learning to write well offer that is lost with dependence on AI?
My answer? So much… Research supports a multitude of benefits from developing the capacity to write with clarity and effective expression. The cognitive psychologist Dr. Ronald
T. Kellogg considers writing a “technology for thinking.” His article lists key benefits of writing:
- Deepening knowledge
- Helping readers retain what they have read.
- Building executive planning skills
- Developing metacognition — “the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style.”
- Forcing writers to stress-test ideas
- Allowing the writer to respond to counterarguments and cite sources.
- Revising as a practice of self-critique and self-improvement
- Empowering because it allows self-expression
- Dealing with emotions productively through journaling (www.nytimes.com)
I would add a few more benefits:
- Writing to learn: the very act of writing can be a tool to for the author to figure out what they’re thinking, to gain more understanding, to examine topics critically, to make connections, etc.
- Developing voice: great writers develop a recognizable and specific voice, just like many singers. HS student Hadley Benson writes about the program for middle schoolers that she leads. With the help of high school students, these middle schoolers learn and practice public speaking in a safe, supportive environment, culminating in their delivering a public speech. She says they gain confidence when they “believe their own thoughts are worth sharing, even when they come out wrong the first time. Students who feel they have a voice at school are seven times more motivated to learn.” [www.the74million.org)
- Generating “original” thought: even if there is “nothing new under the sun,” writers who come up with a meaningful idea on their own – before discovering that others have had that idea as well – develop their own thinking and engage with the material in a deeper and more meaningful way. I will never forget the epiphany my remedial students had: they were reading Of Mice and Men and asked me why Steinbeck always referred to a character as “Curley’s wife” instead of giving her a name. When I turned the question back to them, they decided she wasn’t a person in her own right, a powerful discovery they made on their own. Turning everything over to AI will rob students of discoveries like that.
This long list of the benefits of writing may not be fully realized when students depend on artificial intelligence. We should be wary. Last year, a small study from M.I.T. showed that individuals who wrote in partnership with A.I. chatbots recorded lower brain activity while they wrote, compared with those who worked without chatbots. The writers who used A.I. struggled to remember what, exactly, they had written, and felt little ownership over their work. This long list of the benefits of writing may not be fully realized when students depend on artificial intelligence. We should be wary. Last year, a small study from M.I.T. showed that individuals who wrote in partnership with A.I. chatbots recorded lower brain activity while they wrote, compared with those who worked without chatbots. The writers who used A.I. struggled to remember what, exactly, they had written, and felt little ownership over their work. (https://arxiv.org). These findings join a growing body of research suggesting that frequent A.I. use can degrade critical thinking.
For students with still-developing minds, the most urgent question, then, is how to protect thinking in a world where it has become so easy to outsource writing.
Dr. Steve Graham, a writing expert and educational psychologist at Arizona State University, asserts that “Intellectual growth occurs at every stage, from brainstorming to fine-tuning a final draft. 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 A.I. itself — if they ask a machine to spit out an answer for them?” (www.nytimes.com)
Artificial Intelligence can be a useful tool, but it is no replacement for a writer’s own work, and dependence on it can limit personal growth. A Brookings study finds AI undermines educational and social-emotional development, as well as teacher-student trust. “The risks we found are things like shortcutting learning so that you have less cognitive development,” said Rebecca Winthrop, who heads Brookings’ Center for Universal Education and is an author of the report. Their brains are still developing and school should ideally help them practice critical thinking and “sustained engagement with challenging material.” Yet for most young people, AI isn’t a “cognitive partner” but a surrogate. It doesn’t accelerate their development — it diminishes it via cognitive offloading. The result, researchers say: declining skills across the board. (www.the74million.org2)
Teachers can lead students to use AI as an appropriate tool for many stages of the writing process and preparation for it: brainstorming, initial feedback on drafts, identifying gaps in thinking, explaining complex ideas, offering multiple perspective, etc. None of these replace the students’ own synthesis and expression.
Michael J. Coren says it better than I ever will:
“AI may be making our work better. There’s new evidence it’s making our thinking worse.
When AI tools are accurate — and they get better every month — the gains can be profound. The costs are less obvious but could be just as real: a steady erosion of our natural intelligence.
Imagine hiring a personal trainer. Your goal is to get stronger. But when you go to the gym, you tell your personal trainer to lift the weights for you.
The next hour is a blur of motion as “you,” via your hired muscle, lift more than ever before in your life. Each time you call out another set, the trainer lifts hundreds of pounds with perfect form. Having never broken a sweat, you inscribe your name on the building’s wall of fame.
That, in a sense, is what many do with AI when they direct it to solve the algebra equation, draft the client memo or write the code achieving the task at hand, but eroding their own ability to.” (www.washingtonpost.com)
