Artificial Intelligence and Education

Like the Internet in the 1990’s, the hype and hypocrisy surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) and its real, forecast, and imagined impacts on education at all levels overflows.

As a student, as a parent, as an educator, what do you need to know to understand AI and its benefits and risks?

**updated May 2026**

Sources:

New —

Is AI Making Us Stupid? Cal Newport Is Worried (The Chronicle of Higher
Education)

A writing professor’s new task in the age of AI: Teaching students when to struggle
(The Conversation)

When AI Can Do Everything, What Is Left to Learn? (Chronicle
of Higher Education)

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for
Essay Writing Task (Nataliya Kosmyna et al., arXiv)

Background, impacts, and consequences —

*ChatGPT and generative AI: What is it all about? (The Conversation)

*AI and Large Language Models: shortcomings and mistakes

*The perils of AI-generated deepfake videos

*How ChatGPT robs students of motivation to write and think for themselves (The Conversation)

*AI and the death of student writing: The move away from true hands-on scholarship feels tragic (The Chronicle of Higher Education; requires subscription)

*Does AI really help students learn?

*The Handwriting Revolution: Five semesters after ChatGPT changed education forever, some professors are taking their classes back to the pre-internet era (Inside Higher Ed)

*Students Hate Them. Universities Need Them. The Only Real Solution to the A.I. Cheating Crisis (New York Times; requires subscription)

*An open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt GenAI in education

*Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research (The Conversation)

Tools, processes, and psychology —

*AI, finding information, and surviving

*AI chatbots and “human” language; do words actually mean anything coming from a large language model?

*The “power of the summary”: why do we prefer and trust AI-generated summaries over doing the summarization ourselves?

*Countering AI-generated misinformation with pre-emptive source discreditation and debunking (Royal Society Open Science)

*AI Competencies for Academic Library Workers (ACRL/Association of College & Research Libraries)

More to come …

Questions? Please let me know —

engelk@grinnell.edu