a growing number of college students are reportedly turning to artificial intelligence for help with their coursework and now researchers are warning about the potential negative effects of relying on the technology study from Microsoft and Carnegie Melon published in February found quote higher confidence in generative AI is associated with less critical thinking while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking the study is one of many that New York Magazine's Intelligence Ser features writer James Walsh references in his recent reporting with the headline "Everyone is cheating their way through college." Jame joins James joins us now thank you for being here your article is enlightening uh frightening all of the above i'm going to give some examples of what students told you how they use it taking notes during class study devising study guides practicing tests summarizing novels and textbooks so who needs Spark Notes anymore drafting their essays stem students using it to sail through dense coding where do the students you spoke with draw the line when it comes to getting some harmless help versus plagiarism and cheating right i guess the biggest problem um they have sometimes is understanding where their work begins and ends and where AI's work begins and ends you know uh schools have sort of left it up to teachers to decide what's okay to use AI when it's not okay to use AI and how to use AI and um unfortunately a lot of uh students sort of see those as guidelines not really um hard rules in terms of the honor code um so it's very easy for students to see all of their classmates using AI and think "This is this is okay this is this is a tool that I'm going to have access to the rest of my life i might as well take advantage of it now." Um and you know there's really no kind of short-term consequences but of course over time um the long-term consequences are um you're not necessarily learning or engaging with the material um you know you're not reading the texts i want to circle back to that in a second i mean it sort of is like the adage if you can't beat them join them i mean you're going to be left behind if everybody else is using AI and you're not but what are teachers doing i mean how are they able to detect are they able to detect teachers um I spoke to sort of felt um underwater uh there there are some there are some methods um to detect AI there are some uh AI platforms out there um that can detect with varying degrees of reliability um whether or not uh a block of text has been produced or how much of it has been produced um using AI but essentially you know those tools are are not perfect they're far from perfect um and what this does is kind of creates a situation where you have professors who you know in addition to teaching uh the material need to become PerryMason because they have to you know build these cases uh against students um and it's it's very difficult uh you know the teachers don't necessarily have a lot of faith in these this detection software um and and students know that as well so say a professor sits a student down and says um you know this says this is 80% detected AI you know we we know you used AI a student could just deny deny deny because there's no really good way to prove it teachers already have so much to deal with what are the larger impacts on society on our young minds sure well there's the study we don't know you know it's it's early yet um uh Chat GPT went live in November 2022 so it's about two years a little over two years um uh this the study you just cited um the the detriment it could have overall on critical thinking if we it's natural right if we offload all of this um thinking all of this work uh onto robots you know is it does it look like Wall-E I I certainly hope not um but uh I think our dependence on AI has has um deep implications that we really need to think out and we should be doing that on college campuses where you know um we're shaping in these minds absolutely james Walsh thank you so much for your reporting and for coming on