AI doesn’t lower my cortisol

This week, undergraduate students received an email from a fellow student advertising his new AI startup. Before the email was promptly deleted by “the powers that be,” many students had seen freshman Caden Chuang offer to “lower our cortisol levels,” begging the question: Does AI lower our cortisol?

Of course, as a humanities student, I find myself doing quite a bit of reading. Chuang’s email promises that his platform “reads every slide, PDF and reading your professor uploaded and turns it into an actual study guide.” Wouldn’t it be nice to have a computer do all the work for you? To read the readings, consume the lectures and to study for you? All you have to do is memorize facts!

Chuang’s platform also promises to figure out “exactly where you’re falling short and gives you the precise roadmap to get an A with the least amount of work possible. Your only job is to pull up to the exam.” Even better! We have the honor to do the least work possible!

Maybe I’m an old soul. Maybe I’m the backward one. Maybe I’m the small-minded one. But I just can’t stomach the idea that AI is helpful for education.

Chuang and his AI-bullish cohort view AI as an unadulterated boon to human productivity. They treat schoolwork as if it is a household chore. AI is to education what the washing machine is to laundry.

This mindset of convenience and efficiency then takes precedence over the real purpose of education — to grow the mind. Going to a liberal arts university like Notre Dame is not about learning facts, but rather how to think. Frankly, I could acquire all of the facts I need from my Notre Dame education in less than six months. However, the many readings, discussions and lectures provide invaluable cognitive training.

And if we are to go down extraneous paths — like reading books or articles that we don’t really “need” to read, we benefit more than we even realize. This past fall, I was exposed to a poem from fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry that more succinctly and beautifully expressed the problem with Chuang’s message than I ever could. Berry writes that we should “be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary, / sometimes in the wrong direction.” Understanding that our work is not to accomplish some direct goal, but rather to grow us as a person and thinker is a liberating feeling as a college student. We have lifetimes of careers ahead of us, where knowing facts and following deadlines will be of paramount importance. Why not let college — this wonderful, idyllic cognitive training ground — actually serve its purpose?

Incidentally, as I was writing this column, a Notre Dame professor chimed into the discourse prompted by Chuang’s email. David Smiley, a teaching professor who teaches AI and data science, wrote on LinkedIn that the administration “must state unequivocally that if you do not want to be formed in the classroom and be tested by the fires of critical thinking and academic rigor, then the University of Notre Dame is not the place for you.”

I wholeheartedly agree with professor Smiley. In fact, I am willing to concede that AI may have a role to play in education. AI may serve researchers well in providing useful information regarding existing scholarly work on a given subject. It may also be useful in data organization. In these ways, AI is merely advancing the wealth of technology already used in academia like search engines or spreadsheets.

The struggle with AI, however, is when it shifts actual learning or work from the human mind to the digital mind. I will never trust generative AI to feel the depths of human emotion, nor will I trust AI to actually complete reliable work. Industry leaders who continue to test AI’s reliability continue to be disappointed. Just last week, a top Wall Street law firm was exposed for using generative AI to create a legal brief, hallucinating case law in the process.

The most disappointing part of Chuang’s email, though? It wasn’t from an outside company trying to take our money. It was from a classmate. Our community should know better.

AI doesn’t lower my cortisol as Chuang promises. It raises it. Maybe I’ll be left behind by my peers. Maybe I am accelerating my technological ineptitude. But frankly? I don’t care. I won’t let technology take my ability to think, nor will I mourn the hour and a half I lose by reading a class assignment.

God’s greatest gifts to humanity are our abilities to think, to feel and to struggle. When we yield these gifts to the computers of our own creation, we make ourselves a kind of god while also robbing ourselves of our greatest attributes. What is left is the husk of an automaton. I prefer being Grayson Luke Beckham as God made him.