AI Is Ruining My Education

In November of 2022, during my first year of university, I was sitting in the library, staring at a jumbled to-do list and 15 tabs cluttering my computer screen when a friend came to sit with me. With a glint of mischief in his eye, he asked me if I had heard about “it,” then turned his screen around as if he were revealing the cracked coordinates of Atlantis. In a way, he was: there, on his laptop, was ChatGPT in its newborn glory.

At first, some friends used it to generate jokes and cheesy one-liners, typing in harmless prompts like, “Write a haiku about my philosophy professor,” and, “Flirt only using metaphors.” But soon, it was creeping into places I wasn’t sure it should.

Not long after the AI platform made its debut in my life, a friend was applying for a job. Like most students, he had left his application to the last minute; the deadline was that day. He pulled out his “new friend,” ChatGPT. Within seconds, it spat answers out for him to use. With a little tweak here and there, and requests to sound more humorous and give some “real-life examples,” the application was sent out. What would have taken me an hour and a half, he’d done in about six minutes. He didn’t get the job, but it worried me that people were going to start trading integrity for efficiency en masse.

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Delegating my work to a robot never appealed to me. Using it for school sounded like cheating. But in my second year, in an effort to understand the growing buzz, I plugged in the prompt, “Write about the Palace of Versailles and its significance to King Louis XIV,” something I’d been learning about in my early modern history course. Almost immediately, ChatGPT spat out more than 800 words that touched on divine power, absolute monarchy and ideological symbolism. I was shocked. To write something like that would’ve taken me a whole evening—and AI had done it in about four seconds. 

I quickly understood how easy it was to abuse an option like this. Having the power to produce work in seconds is obviously tempting—which is also why it made me want to run as far away from it as possible. A slope like that was way too slippery to dabble with. Upon closer reading of ChatGPT’s work, I also realized it wasn’t very good. While it was clear, concise and thematic, it lacked insightful analysis and didn’t have a single citation, quotation or source. I couldn’t have found a better reason to stay off the website for good. Everyone else kept using it.

Today, I see symptoms of chatbots everywhere: em dashes are popping up on emails, club posts and breakup texts, as if the world discovered new punctuation overnight. My friend’s year-long relationship ended with: “I still care about you—but I need space—and need to focus on myself.” That heartbreak was delivered with perfect syntax from someone who had never used an em dash in their life. I see accidental ChatGPT leftovers, such as “Happy to help! Here are a few ideas,” on class discussion posts. I notice bibliographies with sources that look brilliantly academic, until I search them up and discover half of them don’t exist. Broken links, fake citations and even page numbers invented out of thin air were making debuts in essays across campus. The idea that ChatGPT could be wielding the pen behind every discussion post, email, essay and study note didn’t just leave me feeling uneasy. It felt like I was watching the beginning of the fall of university education in real time. 

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One night last semester, I was working on a 2,000-word paper on the Royal Proclamation of 1763, due the next day. My eyes were getting heavy and my mind was starting to wander, but I was finally starting to make some progress. It was then that I realized it was a Tuesday night. At Cineplex, “Big Deal Tuesdays” are the one sacred day each week when movie tickets are discounted. My friends were going to see Until Dawn and begged me to come. I wanted to go. I wanted to laugh on the car ride there, sit in a dark theatre with overpriced popcorn and feel like a normal person instead of banging my head against my desk, agonizing over my word count. But I had my paper to attend to. “Just use ChatGPT,” one of them said. “It’ll write it for you.” They were half-joking, and I laughed it off, but it hit me like a gut punch. I realized that hard work was becoming elective and the consequences for cutting corners were dissolving. I stayed home to finish my paper, chipping away at my word count until midnight while my friends enjoyed Tuesday-night luxuries at SilverCity. 

In a political science course, we were asked to post a 250- to 500-word reflection every Friday based on the week’s lecture. It was meant to push us to think critically about what we were learning. Unfortunately, I realized many people were using it to sharpen their ChatGPT-prompting skills, not their opinions. The assigned questions were big ones, like “How would you define freedom?” and “What is democracy?”—the kind of foundational questions university is supposed to make us wrestle with. Instead, my discussion board turned into an AI echo chamber. 

From a class of about 30 students, I saw the same, slightly reworded response about six or seven times a week. “Freedom is the ability for individuals to act without restraint…” or “Democracy is equal say in governance” appeared over and over again like a skipping record. It scared me. These aren’t trivia questions; they’re questions that shape how we see the world. They’re questions we should struggle with. But it felt like no one was struggling anymore—just copying, pasting, rephrasing and submitting. 

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We constantly hear, “You’re only young once,” that university is the time to live our lives and maximize our youth. It was once an age-old scholastic dilemma to exercise willpower, decision-making and work skills, but with AI, it’s now possible to have it all without any of the effort. Students can go out every night, get glowing grades and still get a full night’s sleep. It’s frustrating to work alongside AI users who do their work faster, sound smarter and can still get the same grades, while I stay home doing work the “right” way.

It would be easy to give in. But I can’t help but think about how unearned my degree would feel if I did. There would’ve been no point in paying thousands of dollars a year, enrolling in courses and committing myself to four years of “education” if I got AI to do it all for me. New studies also show that heavy reliance on AI can negatively affect our cognitive engagement and memory retention. The possibility of losing my mind for convenience is not worth it.

Most of my syllabi now include statements on the use of AI. While some of my courses permit its use to gather information and research, others discourage it entirely. But gone are the days when professors and teaching assistants could detect plagiarism solely through intuition; many of them turn to detection software to sniff out AI-generated work. I’ve watched students paste their AI-generated work into AI detection sites, then put their flagged work into an AI humanizer to reword it to try not to sound like AI—only for their work to later be scanned and graded using AI. It feels like we’ve created an environment where software is talking to software while the rest of us sit in the middle of this dizzying cycle, pretending it all still counts as learning.

We choose a school, pick a major and enrol in classes, following the same steadfast path as students before us. The difference now is that we have a painfully accessible and socially acceptable way to do everything in our power to make it meaningless. I know I’m not the only student resisting the AI apocalypse, but it can sometimes feel like I am when I see everyone around me using it. I’ve sat in libraries until midnight with nothing to show for it but a blank page and jumbled ideas, while friends finish essays after an hour with OpenAI and humanizers. In group chats, people don’t just swap ideas, they swap prompts. It’s isolating to be the one still trying. Some days, resisting doesn’t feel noble; it just feels lonely.

A common argument in favour of AI is that it helps protect our time and energy and increase efficiency. But to me, the idea of a world where we’re conditioned to trade hard work for convenience is scary. The whole point of university is to broaden our minds and push ourselves to do difficult things. What people once got lost in—late-night readings, the contemplation of century-old ideas, the labour of love that goes into writing an essay—has vanished almost overnight. Living your life outside of academic responsibilities is important, but with generative AI, the mantra “work smarter, not harder” has taken on a whole new life force. What was meant to be a place of higher learning has turned into a degree mill, fuelled by quick fixes, avoidance and instant reward, all using the same singular employee: ChatGPT.

Students are anxious and, like me, have no idea what’s next. AI has reshaped industries, uprooted career paths and shifted our plans beneath our feet. The futures we were promised when we chose our majors have either transformed beyond recognition or seem impossible to compete in. What makes this all so devastating to me is how exceptionally bright I believe my generation to be. With the widest range of perspectives, endless creativity and critical inquiry, Gen Z has so much potential—and the world needs to see it realized. But as AI exploits people’s most basic instinct to avoid difficult things, I fear we’re in for a rocky ride, especially if we continue to rely on it for tasks we’re more than capable of doing on our own.

Students are not braindead drones controlled by OpenAI. Students have the power to choose how they work, what kind of student they want to be and, most importantly, what their future will hold. Recently, I joined my university’s student newspaper and found like-minded people who are rejecting AI use. We’re committed to training, entertaining and informing students and our community through our own words, one human to another. Being in a room full of people who still care about their own voice—who are choosing the “harder” path on purpose—reminded me that there are still people who value what I do. It made me feel like I wasn’t the one falling behind, that I was holding on to something worth saving. It feels like AI has been lurking in every shadow on campus for the past three years, but this has been a beacon of light. It reminds me that my generation’s future is still as bright as it ever was.

Charlotte MacDonald is a university student studying creative writing and history