The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition

AI leaders should spend more energy reckoning with this fact.
A generation of kids is losing their best opportunity to learn how to read, write, and think, and they will pay the price for their whole lives.
It’s not every student. Some students are becoming more empowered and knowledgeable... See more
Artificial intelligence is already killing off important parts of the human experience. But one of its most consequential murders—so far—is the demise of a longstanding rite of passage for students worldwide: an attempt to synthesize complex information and condense it into compelling analytical prose. It’s a training ground for the most... See more
Brian Klaas • The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition
This isn’t to say that AI is uniformly bad—it’s clearly not—but that we must not fall into the trap of mistaking the outputs of writing (which are increasingly substitutable through technology) from the value of the cognitive process of writing (which hones mental development and cannot be substituted by a machine).