AI use could make us ‘subcognitive’

AI threatens students’ most basic skills. If they lose their ability to understand what they read, will they lose their ability to think?

- Anastasia Berg

Last spring, it became clear to me that over half the students in my large general education lecture course had used artificial intelligence tools, contrary to my explicit policy, to write their final take-home exams. (Ironically, the course was titled Contemporary Moral Problems: The Value of Human Life.)

I had asked them about some very recent work in philosophy, parts of which happened to share titles with entirely different ideas in mediaeval theology. You can guess which topics the students ended up “writing” about.

My situation was hardly unique — rampant AI cheating has been reported all over the country. But I felt a dread I struggled to express until a colleague articulated the problem in stark terms: “Our students are about to turn subcognitive,” she said.

That was it. At stake are not just specialised academic skills or refined habits of mind, but also the most basic form of cognitive fluency. To leave our students to their own devices — which is to say, to the devices of AI companies — is to deprive them of indispensable opportunities to develop their linguistic mastery, and with it, their most elementary powers of thought. This means they will lack the means to understand the world they live in or navigate it effectively.

AI is hardly the first technology to threaten our cognitive competence. Long before ChatGPT, the smartphone and the calculator, Plato warned against writing itself. Literate human beings, he foresaw, would “not use their memories”.

He was not entirely wrong. But few of us would consider this a bad bargain. The written word is, after all, the condition for the survival of these very same Platonic dialogues across two millenniums. Great gifts have often come at great cost. The question is always: Are they worth it?