The Predictor, by Giorgio de Chirico, 1919.
Nadim Kobeissi
Published Jan 23, 2026
AI risks sinking young students into an atrophied, dependent abyss.
My recent experiences as a university professor have made it clear to me that there is an urgent need for a critical examination of the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools into higher educational settings, including at the university. AI demonstrates considerable promise as an instructional aid, but its role in fostering genuine intellectual development seems more geared towards turning eager students into dependents, with increasingly atrophying learning skills.
Artificial intelligence excels in its capacity to serve as a perpetually available instructional …
The Predictor, by Giorgio de Chirico, 1919.
Nadim Kobeissi
Published Jan 23, 2026
AI risks sinking young students into an atrophied, dependent abyss.
My recent experiences as a university professor have made it clear to me that there is an urgent need for a critical examination of the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools into higher educational settings, including at the university. AI demonstrates considerable promise as an instructional aid, but its role in fostering genuine intellectual development seems more geared towards turning eager students into dependents, with increasingly atrophying learning skills.
Artificial intelligence excels in its capacity to serve as a perpetually available instructional companion, capable of walking you through any topic of your choosing, on demand. This unprecedented accessibility, making it a sort of "interactive Wikipedia" if you will, does indeed represent a genuine advancement in democratizing knowledge and is a good thing that students should feel free to make good use of. However, the fact that AI still hallucinates on a semi-regular basis, and its likelihood to dispense shallow, incomplete or misleading information, makes it such that its effective use is only possible if we maintain robust critical thinking skills when interacting with it, always.
Is that the sort of discipline that undergraduate and freshman students are known to come with, built-in? This is where the first pedagogical concern lies: students in their formative years frequently lack the metacognitive discipline necessary to maintain intellectual skepticism when engaging with AI-generated content, and instead are thrilled by the immediate gratification that it provides with answers that seem complete enough to convince others. They’re happy to just "prompt the ’ol LLM" for an answer, then run with it and show it off to their peers and even to their professors.
But the core issue here is that there is a distinction between instruction and education. Authentic education, as opposed to mere information transfer, necessitates that learners engage with assignments deliberately designed to be difficult, painful, and tedious, which is how you challenge their cognitive boundaries. Genuine intellectual growth emerges from the successful navigation of tasks that initially appear insurmountable: that’s the productive struggle that forms new neural pathways and cultivates intellectual resilience, and is precisely why, for example, learning maths, or a musical instrument, requires so much diligent practice.
AI, by its very nature, undermines this essential pedagogical mechanism. When confronted with challenging academic work, students increasingly demonstrate a reflexive tendency to delegate cognitive labor to AI systems rather than persevering through the discomfort that characterizes meaningful learning. This behavioral pattern reflects deficiencies in diligence and discipline required for sustained intellectual effort. And with time, intelligence, too, will atrophy.
The most frightening and urgent issue here is the self-reinforcing nature of AI dependency. As students progressively outsource cognitive tasks, they become increasingly reliant on these tools, creating a dependency spiral with troubling cognitive and even psychological implications. When eventually confronted with the necessity of independent work, many students find themselves in a state of denial, perceiving, perhaps accurately, that their autonomous learning capacities have atrophied beyond easy recovery. This perceived point of no return creates powerful incentives for continued concealment of, and dependence on, AI.
The ramifications of this phenomenon extend throughout the academic ecosystem. Educators face unprecedented challenges in assessment validity and pedagogical design, while students risk foreclosing their own intellectual development during critical formative years. Though AI may indeed function effectively as an "interactive Wikipedia," the wholesale delegation of cognitive effort represents an existential threat to the cultivation of mental diligence and discipline.
If you’re a student that’s dug their own hole due because your reliance on AI has extended beyond using it as an interactive learning companion and onto the realm where it’s taking care of all the heavy-lifting for you, whether it be on your assignments, personal projects or other such tasks, now is the time for you to be brave. Stop transforming yourself into a shell of your own mind, outsourcing everything meant to train you onto the LLM prompt, and begin the hard work of retraining your intellectual muscle. Regain your diligence and independence, even if the initial work is heavy, tough and unforgiving, much like those first couple of weeks at the gym.