Jesus Christ, the kids are finally figuring it out.
After decades of watching American education spiral down the toilet like a fistful of bad acid, we now have a generation of teenagers who’ve stumbled onto a truth that their teachers, parents, and the entire educational-industrial complex have been too chickenshit to admit: They’re getting dumber, and they know EXACTLY why.
According to this latest research out of Oxford University Press—which I’m assuming they compiled between cricket matches and Earl Grey tea parties—80% of British students aged 13 to 18 are regularly using artificial intelligence for their schoolwork. That’s not the shocking part. The shocking part is that 62% of these kids have looked up from their glowing rectangles long enough to realize that this digital brain parasite is eating them alive from the inside.
One in four admits that AI “makes it too easy for me to find the answers without doing the work myself.” Sweet bleeding Jesus, when did teenagers develop this kind of self-awareness? In my day, we’d have killed for a machine that did our homework. We’d have worshipped it like a golden calf. But these kids? They’re sitting there in their classrooms, watching their own cognitive abilities dissolve like sugar in battery acid, and they’re WORRIED about it.
This is either the most hopeful thing I’ve heard in years or the most terrifying. I haven’t decided yet.
THE THING IS, they’re absolutely right to be scared. The MIT eggheads have been measuring brain activity while students use ChatGPT to write essays, and what they found would make George Orwell reach for the Wild Turkey. The electrical patterns in these kids’ brains are different—not better different, not evolved different, but ATROPHIED different. Like watching muscle tissue waste away in time-lapse photography.
We’ve created a generation of students who can summon any answer they want from the digital ether, but they’re slowly losing the ability to generate their own thoughts. It’s like giving someone a Ferrari but surgically removing their legs. Sure, they can get places faster, but god help them if the battery dies.
And here’s where it gets really twisted: Nearly half of these students are paranoid that their classmates are “secretly using AI” without the teachers catching on. Think about that for a minute. We’ve turned education into a surveillance state where students are ratting each other out for thought crimes, except instead of sneaking answers from the kid next to them, they’re sneaking answers from a machine that doesn’t even understand the questions.
The teachers can’t spot it. Of course they can’t spot it. Most of them are still struggling to figure out how to unmute themselves on Zoom. They’re up there at the front of the classroom, wondering why Johnny’s essay on Shakespeare suddenly sounds like it was written by a very polite robot with a degree in English Literature from Cambridge, which is EXACTLY what it was.
Alexandra Tomescu, Oxford’s “generative AI and machine learning product specialist”—which is apparently what we call people who study how machines are replacing human thought these days—says she’s “fascinated” by how sophisticated the students’ understanding is. She’s impressed that 60% of them recognize that AI encourages copying rather than original work.
Well, no shit, Alexandra. These kids aren’t idiots. They’re just being systematically trained to become idiots by a system that’s too incompetent to realize what it’s doing.
BUT HERE’S THE BEAUTIFUL IRONY that nobody seems to be talking about: The same technology that’s rotting their brains is also teaching them to think critically about technology. They’re developing a kind of meta-awareness that previous generations never had. They can see the Matrix even as they’re stuck inside it.
One 15-year-old girl says AI helps her understand math better. A 14-year-old boy claims he now “thinks faster” than he used to. Are they deluded? Are they experiencing actual cognitive enhancement? Or are they just confusing the speed of information retrieval with actual thinking?
The answer, of course, is yes. All of the above. Welcome to the future, where every question has multiple correct answers and none of them matter.
The students are begging their teachers for guidance on how to use AI “appropriately.” They want to know when it’s okay to let the machine think for them and when they should do the heavy lifting themselves. These are the questions that philosophers and ethicists have been wrestling with for years, and we’re expecting biology teachers and gym coaches to have the answers.
Good luck with that.
WHAT REALLY GETS ME is the sheer honesty of it all. Twelve percent say AI “limits my creative thinking.” Others admit it makes them less likely to solve problems or write creatively. These are teenagers—TEENAGERS!—displaying more intellectual integrity than entire university departments dedicated to studying this stuff.
They’re not pretending that technology is going to save them. They’re not buying into the Silicon Valley fever dream that artificial intelligence will unlock human potential and usher in a new age of enlightenment. They’re looking at this thing with clear eyes and saying, “Yeah, this is convenient as hell, but it’s also turning my brain into cottage cheese.”
That’s wisdom. Terrible, depressing, dystopian wisdom, but wisdom nonetheless.
The educational establishment is responding to this crisis in the most predictable way possible: by launching an “AI education hub” to help teachers understand how to use these tools. Because what we really need is more bureaucracy, more committees, more “hubs” and “initiatives” and “frameworks for digital literacy.”
Meanwhile, the kids are sitting in their bedrooms at 2 AM, asking ChatGPT to write their essays about Lord of the Flies, fully aware that they’re cheating themselves out of an education, unable to stop because everyone else is doing it too, and if they don’t keep up they’ll fall behind in a system that measures success by grades rather than actual learning.
IT’S A RACE TO THE BOTTOM, and the prize for winning is a diploma that certifies you’ve successfully outsourced your thinking to a machine.
The really savage part? Only 2% of students say they don’t use AI at all. TWO PERCENT. That’s the remnant. The holdouts. The Luddites and the idealists and the kids whose parents won’t let them have smartphones. They’re probably getting worse grades than their AI-assisted classmates, which means the system is actively punishing the only students who are still developing their own cognitive abilities.
We’ve built an educational arms race where the weapons are getting smarter while the soldiers get dumber, and everybody knows it’s happening but nobody has the guts to call for a ceasefire.
So here we are: A generation of students smart enough to recognize they’re being lobotomized by convenience, self-aware enough to articulate exactly how it’s happening, but too trapped in the system to do anything about it. They’re like passengers on a runaway train, watching the speedometer climb higher and higher, knowing exactly where this is headed but unable to reach the brakes.
And the adults in charge? They’re launching education hubs.
God help us all.
Source: Pupils fear AI is eroding their ability to study, research finds