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.