Don't Tell Us To Write Our Papers With AI

If Harvard College Dean David J. Deming is right, we might all begin writing our essays in “Claudish.”

On the first day of classes, the dean sent an email to the student body. Of the topics mentioned, the longest was a section on artificial intelligence use policies, in which he wrote of his plans to roll out College-wide advisory guidelines on AI by the end of the year. The dean wrote approvingly of “AI acceptance or even encouragement” in classes involving intensive writing or project based learning, raising the eyebrows of some faculty.

No doubt, society-wide, AI is here to stay. It’s only natural that the classroom must adapt. Still, to encourage unfettered use of AI, especially for “writing-intensive” courses, is antithetical to promoting learning and jeopardizes the purpose of a liberal arts education.

Deming’s email linked to a Substack article by Colorado State University professor Kyle L. Saunders, which seems to propose that it would be fine for a student to produce a high quality, long-form piece of AI-generated or AI-assisted text, as long as a student disclosed the use of the technology in line with course policy.

However, it’s still unclear how AI could be used to support academic writing without meaningfully outsourcing one’s thinking. Professors might not be able to enforce a prohibition on its use for larger take-home work, but that isn’t a reason to encourage it either.

Deming is willing to admit that AI is harmful when it shortcuts demonstrations of mastery — so much so that it’s worth designing courses to prevent its use. But the tasks that are more common within long-form assignments are also worth protecting: things such as research synthesis, revision, and structuring.

In synthesis, a student has to weigh which sources merit inclusion and how best to relate them. In revision, one learns to spot holes in an argument and rebuild it. Structuring requires moving between different resolutions of information to follow a broader argument’s narrative.

One could let AI take over these steps, and in so doing, preclude the sustained thinking involved in incredibly educational points in the research process. That’s not worth encouraging.

Nonetheless, we agree when Deming argues that AI detection is, at present, an unreliable approach. Prevailing software for sniffing out AI can suffer from unacceptable rates of false positives, or at the very least remain manipulable to human editing.

However, it’s important to emphasize that professors don’t need detection to make sure AI isn’t getting in the way of learning. Oral defenses of papers, for example, can be used to identify whether a student has absorbed the intended knowledge from the course or not.

It’s telling that the argument referenced by Deming for encouraging AI use was put forward by a professor avowedly hoping to keep his students as efficient as their professional competitors.

AI has a place in many industries, but that doesn’t mean we should invite it into our classrooms. The goal of a Harvard education is not strictly pre-professional: while many of us will go on to use AI in our careers, liberal arts courses shouldn’t prioritize on-the-job skills.

After all, even students who most value their future professional endeavors will benefit from learning the basics thoroughly, developing foundational internalized knowledge that will enable them to adapt as technology continues to change.

We continue to believe that classroom policy should remain in the hands of those most directly qualified to determine it: the faculty of the College. Deming’s endeavor to seek input from professors, staff, and students before drafting these advisory guidelines comes at an opportune time, and we hope to see him continue to communicate with the Harvard community about its evolving policies.

Let us not forget how high the stakes are. Universities are increasingly grappling with the effects of AI on learning, and Harvard has a chance to champion the conscientious deployment of technology in the classroom.

So close out your command-line interfaces. AI is not replacing the liberal arts any time soon.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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