'The learning comes from wrestling'

Jacob wrestles with an angel, earning the name "Israel" or "he who struggles with God"

While most students are using AI to do their school work, a hardy minority is "determined to keep learning the hard way," writes Maya Sulkin in The Free Press. They fear losing their ability to think and communicate, their self-respect and their "humanity."

Saira Chabria, 17, who attends a public high school on Long Island, doesn't want to "lose herself," she told Sulkin. By relying on a chatbot, "You’re losing the ability to communicate your own feelings, your own beliefs, your own ideas, and you’re also losing the ability to come up with those ideas and beliefs." She sees it in classmates. "They can't think for themselves."

Aidan Hunter, a junior at Columbia University studying classics and philosophy, said, “You can obtain facts from AI, but you can’t obtain knowledge. The learning comes from wrestling.”

Even those used to instant gratification feel "a bit uncomfortable when nothing is hard," says Spencer Klavan, an author and lecturer at the University of Oxford. It's against human nature.

“If you are just trying to get through the task of living like it’s busywork and to get a machine to do it for you — the task of reading a book, experiencing a novel, looking at a painting — why shouldn’t you tell the robot to look at a sunset for you or eat your food and describe how it tastes? There are things that are valuable to do because it’s you that’s doing them, and if you outsource those things to a machine, ultimately you’ll have all the free time in the world and no idea what to do with it.” -- Spencer Klavan

Nivriti Agaram, 20, a senior at George Washington University, cited Joan Didion’s 1961 essay on self-respect. “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”

Nineteen-year-old Ruby LaRocca compares people who outsource their work to AI to drug users. “You’re a user, that’s what you are. Now studying Shakespeare in Scotland, LaRocca is “constantly in the position of struggling at something and often failing," she concedes. But she's willing to educate herself the hard way, she told Sulkin. When you don’t learn to think, “You don’t protect yourself against the forms of easy thinking like fanaticism or extremism.”