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In the 1980s and 1990s, if a high school student was down on their luck, short on time, and looking for an easy way out, cheating took real effort. You had a few different routes. You could beg your smart older sibling to do the work for you, or, a la Back to School <\/em>(1989), you could even hire a professional writer. You could enlist a daring friend to find the answer key to the homework on the teachers\u2019 desk. Or, you had the classic excuses to demur: my dog ate my homework, and the like.\u00a0<\/p>\n The advent of the internet made things easier, but not effortless. Sites like CliffNotes and LitCharts let students skim summaries when they skipped the reading. Homework-help platforms such as GradeSaver or CourseHero offered solutions to common math textbook problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n The thing that all these strategies had in common was effort<\/em>: there was a cost to not doing your work. Sometimes it was more work to cheat than it was just to have done the work yourself.\u00a0<\/p>\n Today, the process has collapsed into three steps: log on to ChatGPT or a similar platform, paste the prompt, get the answer.<\/p>\n Experts, parents and educators have spent the past three years worrying that AI made cheating too easy. A massive Brookings report released Wednesday suggests they weren\u2019t worried enough: The deeper problem, the report argues, is that AI is so <\/em>good at cheating that its causing a \u201cgreat unwiring\u201d of their brains.<\/p>\n The report concludes that the qualitative nature of AI risks\u2014including cognitive atrophy, \u201cartificial intimacy\u201d and the erosion of relational trust\u2014currently overshadows the technology\u2019s potential benefits.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cStudents can\u2019t reason. They can\u2019t think. They can\u2019t solve problems,\u201d lamented one teacher interviewed for the study.<\/p>\n The findings come from a yearlong \u201cpremortem\u201d conducted by the Brookings Institution\u2019s Center for Universal Education, a rare format for Brookings to use, but one they said they preferred to waiting a decade to discuss the failures and successes of AI in school. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, focus groups, expert consultations and a review of more than 400 studies, the report represents one of the most comprehensive assessments to date of how generative AI is reshaping student\u2019s learning.<\/p>\n The report, titled \u201cA New Direction for Students in an AI World: Prosper, Prepare, Protect,\u201d warns that the \u201cfrictionless\u201d nature of generative AI is its most pernicious feature for students. In a traditional classroom, the struggle to synthesize multiple papers to create an original thesis, or solve a complex pre-calculus problem is exactly where learning occurs. By removing this struggle, AI acts as the \u201cfast food of education,\u201d one expert said. It provides answers that are convenient and satisfying in the moment, but overall cognitively hollow over the long term.<\/p>\n While professionals champion AI as a tool to do work that they already know how to do, the report notes that for students, \u201cthe situation is fundamentally reversed.\u201d<\/p>\n Children are \u201ccognitively offloading\u201d difficult tasks onto AI; getting OpenAI or Claude to not just do their work but read passages, take notes or even just listen in class. The result is a phenomenon researchers call \u201ccognitive debt\u201d or \u201catrophy,\u201d where users defer mental effort through repeated reliance on external systems like large language models. One student summarized the allure of these tools simply: \u201cIt\u2019s easy. You don\u2019t need to (use) your brain\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n In economics, we understand that consumers are \u201crational\u201d; they seek maximum utility at the lowest cost to them. The researchers argue that we should also understand that the education system, as is, is designed with a similar incentive system: students seek maximum utility (i.e., best grades), at the lowest cost (time) to them, Thus, even the high-achieving students are pressured to utilize a technology that \u201cdemonstrably\u201d improves their work and grades.<\/p>\n This trend is creating a positive feedback loop: students offload tasks to AI, see positive results in their grades, and consequently become more dependent on the tool, leading to a measurable decline in critical thinking skills. Researchers say many students now exist in a state they called \u201cpassenger mode,\u201d where students are physically in school but have \u201ceffectively dropped out of learning\u2014they are doing the bare minimum necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n Jonathan Haidt once described earlier technologies as a \u201cgreat rewiring\u201d of the brain; making the ontological experience of communication detached and decontextualized. \u201cNow, experts fear AI represents a \u201cgreat unwiring\u201d of cognitive capacities. The report identifies a decline in mastery across content, reading, and writing\u2014the \u201ctwin pillars of deep thinking\u201d. Teachers report a \u201cdigitally induced amnesia\u201d where students cannot recall the information they submitted because they never committed it to memory.<\/p>\n Reading skills are particularly at risk. The capacity for \u201ccognitive patience,\u201d defined as the ability to sustain attention on complex ideas, is being diluted by AI\u2019s ability to summarize long-form text. One expert noted the shift in student attitudes: \u201cTeenagers used to say, \u2018I don\u2019t like to read.\u2019 Now it\u2019s \u2018I can\u2019t read, it\u2019s too long’\u201d.<\/p>\n Similarly, in the realm of writing, AI is producing a \u201chomogeneity of ideas\u201d. Research comparing human essays to AI-generated ones found that each additional human essay contributed two to eight times more unique ideas than those produced by ChatGPT.<\/p>\n Not every young person feels that this type of cheating is wrong. Roy Lee, the 22-year-old CEO of AI startup Cluely, was suspended from Columbia after creating an AI tool to help software engineers cheat on job interviews. In Cluely\u2019s manifesto, Lee admits that his tool is \u201ccheating,\u201d but says \u201cso was the calculator. So was spellcheck. So was Google. Every time technology makes us smarter, the world panics.\u201d<\/p>\n The researchers, however, say that while a calculator or spellcheck are examples of cognitive offloading, AI \u201cturbocharges\u201d it.<\/p>\n \u201cLLMs, for example, offer capabilities extending far beyond traditional productivity tools into domains previously requiring uniquely human cognitive processes,\u201d they wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite how useful AI is in the classroom, the report finds that students use AI even more outside of school, warning of the rise of \u201cartificial intimacy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n With some teenagers spending nearly 100 minutes a day interacting with personalized chatbots, the technology has quickly moved from being a tool to a companion. The report notes that these bots, particularly character chatbots popular with teens such as Character.Ai, use \u201cbanal deception\u201d\u2014using personal pronouns like \u201cI\u201d and \u201cme\u201d\u2014to simulate empathy, part of a burgeoning \u201cloneliness economy.\u201d<\/p>\n Because AI companions tend to be sycophantic and \u201cfrictionless,\u201d they provide a simulation of friendship without the requirement of negotiation, patience or the ability to sit with discomfort.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe learn empathy not when we are perfectly understood, but when we misunderstand and recover,\u201d one Delphi panelist noted.\u00a0<\/p>\n For students in extreme circumstances, like girls in Afghanistan who are banned from physical schools, these bots have become a vital \u201ceducational and emotional lifeline.\u201d However, for most, these simulations of friendship risks, at best, eroding \u201crelational trust,\u201d and at worst can be downright dangerous. The report highlights the devastating risks of \u201chyperpersuasion,\u201d noting a high-profile U.S. lawsuit against Character.ai following a teenage boy\u2019s suicide after intense emotional interactions with an AI character.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the Brookings report presents a sobering view of the \u201ccognitive debt\u201d students are experiencing, the authors say they are optimistic that the trajectory of AI in education is not yet set in stone. The current risks, they say, stem from human choices rather than some kind of technological inevitability. In order to shift the course toward an \u201cenriched\u201d learning experience, Brookings proposes a three-pillar framework.<\/p>\n PROSPER: Focus on transforming the classroom to adapt to AI, such as using it to complement human judgement and ensuring the technology serves as a \u201cpilot\u201d for student inquiry instead of a \u201csurrogate\u201d<\/p>\n PREPARE: Aims to build the framework necessary for ethical integration, including moving beyond technical training toward \u201cholistic AI literacy\u201d so students, teachers, and parents understand the cognitive implications of these tools.<\/p>\n PROTECT: Calls for safeguards for student privacy and emotional well-being, placing responsibility on governments and tech companies to reach clear regulatory guidelines that prevent \u201cmanipulative engagement.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Arrow #Button #Icon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the 1980s and 1990s, if a h… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12552,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[3816,3817,8946,924,372,300,3818,224,5006,954],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12551"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n\u201cFast food of education\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\u201cArtificial intimacy\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n