Project 2 by Dany Zheng

What Happens After A.I Destroys College Writing?

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-02 18:01:43 UTC

Innovation

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-02 18:19:16 UTC

When students use A.I to actively learn, making practice problems, brainstorming, gathering data. Using A.I as a tool to expand your knowledge and retaining the information A.I produces(13).

Stagnation

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-02 18:19:29 UTC

When the students use A.I for efficiency with no thought behind it. The main goal being just to get the assignment down with no retention of what happened(5).

Alex's Response (Student at NYU)

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-02 19:12:27 UTC

“It’s cheating, but I don’t think it’s, like, cheating,” Eugene said. He saw Alex’s art-history essay as a
victimless crime. He was just fulfilling requirements, not training to become a literary scholar"(5).

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:09:59 UTC

"In certain fields, this wasn’t a huge stretch. Studies show that A.I. is particularly effective in helping non-native speakers acclimate to college-level writing in English. In some stem classes, using generative A.I. as a tool is acceptable"(6).

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:12:15 UTC

"E-mails, texts, social-media posts, angry missives in comments sections, customer-service chats—let alone one’s actual work. The way we write shapes our thinking. We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day, in what the literary scholar Deborah Brandt calls our era of “mass writing"(7).

Dan Melzer (Professor at University of California Davis)

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:16:15 UTC

"He was sympathetic to kids who viewed some of their assignments as dull and mechanical and turned to ChatGPT to expedite the process. He called the !ve-paragraph essay—the classic “hamburger” structure, consisting of an introduction, three supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion— “outdated,” having descended from élitist traditions"(8).

Eddie ( Employee at LA County)

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:20:51 UTC

"He told me that he used A.I. “as a brainstorm” but never for writing itself. “I limit myself, for sure.” Eddie works for Los Angeles County, and he was talking to me during a break. He admitted that, when he was pressed for time, he would sometimes use ChatGPT for quizzes. “I don’t know if I’m telling myself a lie,” he said. “I’ve given myself opportunities to do things ethically, but if I’m rushing to work I don’t feel bad about that,” particularly for courses outside his major"(10).

May (Student at Georgetown)

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:24:29 UTC

“I don’t think it’s made me a worse writer,” she said. “It’s perhaps made me a less patient writer. I used to spend hours writing essays, nitpicking over my wording, really thinking about how to phrase things.” College had made her reflect on her experience at an extremely competitive high school, where she had received top grades but retained very little knowledge. As a result, she was the rare student who found college somewhat relaxed. ChatGPT helped her breeze through busywork and deepen her engagement with the courses she felt passionate about"(11).

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:29:32 UTC

"They appear nonchalant about the
question of achievement, and even dissociated from their work, since it is only notionally theirs. Joseph, a Division I athlete at a Big Ten school, told me that he saw no issue with using ChatGPT for his classes, but he did make one exception: he wanted to experience his African-literature course “authentically,” because it involved his heritage" (12).

Kevin (Student at Syracuse University)

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:31:13 UTC

"Kevin, by contrast, desired a more general kind of moral distinction. I asked if he would be bothered to receive a lower grade on an essay than a classmate who’d used ChatGPT. “Part of me is able to compartmentalize and not be pissed about it,” he said. “I developed myself as a human. I can have a superiority complex about it. I learned more"(11).

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:33:39 UTC

"In 2023, researchers at Harvard introduced a self-paced A.I. tutor in a popular physics course. Students who used the A.I. tutor reported higher levels of engagement and motivation and did better on a test than those who were learning from a professor"(13).

May (Student at Georgetown)

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:34:25 UTC

"May, the Georgetown student, told me that she often has ChatGPT produce extra practice questions when she’s studying for a test"(13).

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:39:58 UTC

"Education, particularly in the humanities, rests on a belief that, alongside the practical things students might retain, some arcane idea mentioned in passing might take root in their mind, blossoming years in the future. A.I. allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human. I often tell my students that this is the last time in their lives that someone will have to read something they write, so they might as well tell me what they actually think"(16).

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:42:41 UTC

"Alex, who was settling in in the East Village. He’d just finished his finals, and estimated that he’d spent between thirty minutes and an hour composing two papers for his humanities classes. Without the assistance of Claude, it might have taken him around eight or nine hours. “I didn’t retain anything,” he wrote. “I couldn’t tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha.” He received an A-minus and a B-plus"(17).

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 00:44:05 UTC

"None of the students I spoke with seemed lazy or passive. Alex and Eugene, the N.Y.U. students, worked hard—but part of their effort went to editing out anything in their college experiences that felt extraneous"(17).

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 18:29:29 UTC

Humans learn the most based off the mistakes they make. If someone never made mistakes then they would be perfect but perfection has the innate problem of stagnation. Nothing ever changes if you're perfect, and that is the problem with using A.I. You don't learn when you use it because it gives you the answer without you going through the process of why that is the answer. So to someone like Kevin who takes pride in knowing he went through the learning process, he made those mistakes but can now use that as the basis for correct answers in the future. I think mistakes are the back bone of how humans learn and without them we just go through the motions without retaining any of the information. Resulting in this cycle of doing work but not understanding why something is done a certain way.

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 18:46:24 UTC

When students resort to the use of A.I its almost like a sign that they are distancing themselves from a certain class or assignment. They just want to get it done as fast as possible with no true thought behind there work. In the name of efficiency or just laziness they use A.I to cut down there workload. Both students and professors realize the effect of A.I and how when it's used to complete assignments, you end up retaining nothing since it wasn't your original work. It fully stunts the learning of the student, causing them to become stagnated in a cycle of not learning. Further proof of this is how Joseph is specifically reframing from using A.I in his African literature course. Since he is invested and wants to really know the information that will be taught in that course. Students can recognize that A.I is detrimental to the learning process if used incorrectly but students still relay it anyway.

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 20:48:53 UTC

Alex who would be classified as a hard working student picks and chooses what he uses A.I for. To him it all depends on how much care/attachment he has towards the work. If he doesn't think its important then using A.I. is a no brainer as it save him hours in his day. This is obviously hindering his learning experience but I think Alex's mindset is if he doesn't care about it in the first place, then why waste any effort doing the assignment. I can agree with this philosophy as personally If I think of something as busy work then I also just get it done as fast as possible with minimal thought.

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 21:08:33 UTC

A.I. if used correctly could be one of the greatest learning tools but its all up to the person and weather or not they are disciplined enough to fight the temptations of speeding through all of there work. It comes down to the individual person in weather or not they make A.I into an effective learning tool. As it can explain problems to you, it becomes almost like a pocket tutor. But having that accessibility is a problem in itself since its way to easy to get answers to a problem you don't know. However, if A.I is turned into a tool that engages you into the content it becomes immensely effective and accelerates your learning. It could revolutionize learning as it can make infinite practice problems or thoroughly explain topics to deepen your understanding. It can harbor innovations in the learning process for almost anything including languages, but it all depends on how it is applied and the mental restraint from taking the easy way out and letting A.I do all the work. It is all about how motivated the students is and weather A.I. enhances or diminishes that motivation. I think A.I is a powerful tool and as time goes on, people will create different uses for this tool. Its the nature of humanity we always strive for more, give it sometime and A.I will be used to innovate on life, breaking through limitation we thought were impossible.

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 21:27:45 UTC

We live in a word surrounded by text and writing. Even though people say we are in a digital age, words are still a part of our everyday life. We still read everyday weather you realize or not. So even if A.I. hypothetically takes over college writing then the language doesn't die, it will just evolve with A.I. Literature is a forever evolving concept as new terms and phrases are created everyday. The language of today is significantly different from the languages of the past. Take English for example it has had many forms throughout the centuries. so I think the invention of A.I assisted writing will just make it take another form. Not ruining it but changing and forming English into something new.

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 23:39:45 UTC

Again comes up this idea of A.I being used to expedite work in a quicker fashion. May knows the mechanics of writing but is using chat GPT to be more efficient with her time. Like instead do spending hours over the keyboard figuring out what word to use she now instead spends her time doing what she is passionate about. Yes she is using A.I to complete her busy work but the trade off is well worth it for her. She already knows how to write so the learning process isn't applicable to her and she now has more time to get emersed into her passion. A.I. opened a door for her to pursue her dreams instead of being dragged down by busy work.

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-03 23:47:22 UTC

Eddie see's the flaws in using A.I, realizing the negative effects it has on the human learning process. But he can also see the potential in it is a tool to help you learn. A.I is one of the most powerful brain storming tools a person can use as it has the whole internet at its disposal. It can pull anything from anywhere to help you complete an assignment. But being reliant on it will hinder the cognitive abilities of your brain. As you default to using A.I instead of thinking for yourself. But when time is running short even the most ethical students break as it's so easy to let A.I finish an assignment for you and not get points deduced for a late submission.

Humans Still Need To Know How To Write

danyzheng18 — 2025-10-09 13:01:04 UTC

Writing is one of the main ways of communications humans use. And no matter what A.I does it cant take away the fact that text will forever be a part of society(7).