Throughout recent university years, many students have depended on whatever AI platform was “the best” at the moment to help them through last-minute reading assignments and study sessions. Now, most have become experts in crafting up prompts for these AI chatbots so that they respond with the most complex, interesting, in-depth responses possible. But is that all students have become capable of?

This fall, second year Politics: Philosophy and Economics students were given a chance to challenge this notion; they were now enrolled in a course called History of Political Thought, taught by Professor Seth N. Jaffe. Any student of Professor Jaffe is aware of his distinctive classroom policy: no technology permitted in his lectures, a long-standing policy of his for over six years. This departure from typical classroom policy prompted a deeper conversation with Professor Jaffe, seeking to uncover the philosophy behind his ban and the evolving “friction” between the lecture hall and the screens inside of it.

Naturally, the first question for Professor Jaffe was why. Why put this policy in place if the university has become so intertwined with technology? The professor said it was implemented largely due to the fact that over his 15 year teaching career, he had “begun noticing more and more students on phones – distracted, on laptops – distracted.” To Professor Jaffe, this distraction presented as an almost insurmountable obstacle standing between a student and their education. His response: leave your phone and computer at the door of the lecture hall.

Professor Jaffe maintains that the minute a student is on their phone, they are “no longer here…but rather somewhere else.” They are now in another realm, the online realm, and become impossible to interact with on this plane of the human world. Once there are 130 students in a lecture hall, almost all focused on something other than the lecturer, Professor Jaffe argues this type of mental absence “undermines the ability of instructors… to educate.”

“[W]hat does it mean that students cannot go one hour and 15 minutes without checking their devices?” Professor Jaffe asked, alluding to the addictive characteristics of phones and the apps on them. The level of addiction to screens has made it so that most students are going to lecture exclusively to sign for attendance, not to listen to the lecture. When a computer is open in the lecture hall, it almost certainly has either work for another class or a computer game open. A student on their phone is most likely texting or scrolling social media. This is something even the brightest students in these classrooms are guilty of. And now, with AI becoming an increasingly important tool in students’ toolboxes, this (over)reliance on technology is only worsening. If your phones were impacting your ability to be mentally present, AI is ready to deliver the final blow.

While Professor Jaffe does not believe that AI is an issue exclusively for students of the humanities, he does believe it poses a significant challenge for them in particular. Reading a text, and being able to analyze it critically, is a key component of many humanities classes,Professor Jaffe’s course being an example. He questioned how many of the students actually do all of the readings; the response: most likely very few. He then posed a question to students reading this article: “How many of you can do the readings?”

The emergence of AI has led to it becoming a sort of super-homework-helper. When a student plugs something into ChatGPT, they forfeit their ability to develop their own critical thinking skills. And when they plug in an essay prompt, they forfeit their ability to form and deepen their own opinions. In Jaffe’s mind, what was once a short cut is now beginning to put basic critical thinking skills at risk.

As a result of this innovation, the essay, a once lauded form of assessment, is (mostly) dead, it will most likely remain dead, and it is AI that killed it. When asked Professor Jaffe what he believes is the most significant loss related to the rise of AI, he responded that in terms of his own course, it’s been the removal of essay assignments, on which he commented, “[it’s] a shame. I think [the removal of the essay assignment]…undermines my ability to teach students.” Writing long essays, fueled by a student’s own perception of a text or topic, used to be a hallmark of a well-rounded liberal arts education. Now, these kinds of writing assignments must be highly-monitored, and are at risk of being rendered obsolete.

Additionally, Jaffe argues that “Insofar as these tools short circuit learning by providing ready-made answers to questions they deny students the ability to…develop their own thoughts. Overall, I worry…these tools fundamentally undermine the attention necessary for education [and] the skills that develop by having to struggle.” The AI-shortcut has led to what the professor calls a “loss of friction, ” friction being the difficulty that students might face when interacting with the materials they learn in their courses and the assignments that are supposed to supplement their learning. Friction is the thing that makes learning hard, but rewarding.

Professor Jaffe considers this a significant loss, considering,“[W]hat if education requires friction and struggle?” AI greatly reduces the amount of hardship one must encounter in their life to become good, most importantly in an academic sense: good at thinking, good at reading, good at any skill that requires mental struggle. If ChatGPT is writing all your essays, and Google Gemini is translating your French homework, then what have you actually done, and therefore what have you, through friction and hardship, learnt? Have you become reliant on the existence of something artificial? And if you continue to rely on these tools, then are you letting skills that should be yours become something that must be outsourced?

“One can spend one’s entire life running to get somewhere, but is that really what life is about?… if you’re always trying to get somewhere else, then you can spend your entire life on that

treadmill.” said Professor Jaffe when upon being questioned whether he believed that the reliance on AI tools at LUISS was dependent on students’ high-achieving goals. Ultimately, the use of the AI shortcut is partially due to the intense pressure put on grades at universities, especially here at LUISS. Here, getting a 30 on an exam is just the next box to tick off on a long list of necessary achievements one must achieve in order to continue to propel oneself through life.

Consider these questions next time you intend to plug a reading into ChatGPT and let it do all the heavy-lifting for you. Think about how rewarding it would be to quote Kant and know the context of the quote. How much more rewarding would your academic journey be if you’d let your brain do the heavy-lifting?

In the end, Professor Jaffe knows that technology will continue to be a large part of our academic journeys, and will most likely maintain its position as a companion of humanity. He also emphasizes that he doesn’t believe that no professor has use for technology in their classroom, rather that this is simply the best policy for his class, given its subject matter. After hearing him out, the policy becomes quite convincing.

Despite this one professor’s plan to fight back against this takeover of students’ brains, the true fear of overreliance on technology will continue to linger – especially as different technologies continue to improve. However, if you can learn to rely on yourself, and on your own brain power, the friction that comes with that reliance will serve you greatly in the future. Remember, the skills you actually work for are yours, and no one, not even a super-scary super-AI, can take them away from you.

A cura di Alice Foresti