If I were to name one thing that has defined my college experience, it would have to be AI. ChatGPT was released in Nov. 2022, halfway through my senior year of high school. Within a year of its release, I created an account using one of my more spammy email addresses and was asking it to summarize readings or reword an awkward sentence for my research paper. I soon became a regular inquirer. Now, I don’t use generative AI for anything. But it still defines my college experience, affecting everything surrounding my education.

EMU’s AI policy is briefly outlined in the undergraduate catalog, which took some digging to find. It outlines being AI “literate,” including understanding how generative AI systems work, and even that “AI can be good for tasks such as outlines, brainstorming, checking grammar, spelling and/or style.” It also posits that we should “understand limitations, benefits and risks” of generative AI, including its biases, tendencies to hallucinate, climate impact and more. The document appears to have been revised most recently in Dec. 2023, a year after ChatGPT’s release. Professors don’t include these guidelines in their syllabi with other institutional policies, but are encouraged to provide their own policies specific to each course. They often don’t.

AI is a somewhat contentious topic at EMU. There are those of us who are staunchly opposed and there are also those peers who will shamelessly present copied-straight-from-ChatGPT projects to the class. Our campus life representatives send out visibly AI-generated emails and event posters, to the dismay of some and unnoticed by others. Our official AI policy is buried deep in generally untouched online handbooks. We definitely don’t have a campus culture that discourages AI use, leading to irresponsible uses slipping through the cracks.

Even at the Weather Vane, our paper here at EMU, we don’t have an official AI policy. Ideally, students interested in contributing to a newspaper have their own strong morals surrounding AI use. However last year, before I was Co-Editor, a few AI-generated articles were submitted. (They were not published.) My question: why voluntarily sign up for an extracurricular activity requiring writing when you don’t want to write?

The Weather Vane has struggled this semester to find willing writers. While I can’t directly attribute this to AI, I believe that the larger cultural shift ushered in by increasingly ubiquitous generative AI models might be to blame. Let’s face it: most college students don’t read the news, and they want communications and entertainment to come easily. If your information typically comes from Google’s AI overview, a long-form feature might be a struggle to get through. And as we lose people who want to read, we also lose those who want to write. 

As one of EMU’s last two Writing majors (the program was officially closed two years ago due to low enrollment,), I like to think I am witnessing firsthand the last shuddering breaths of writing at the college level. Yet even as I watch AI breach all forms of writing and creativity, I also see glimmers of hope: English learners at my tutoring sessions writing eloquent narratives, students from outside of the humanities trying out a poetry course, and those of us who still believe in the power of student journalism working on our paper while Wednesday becomes Thursday. One thing I wish I could see more is students actually reading that paper.

I have friends who use Google’s chatbot Gemini for everything from help with relationships to Instagram captions. These are incredibly intelligent people, yet I see them starting to struggle to figure things out on their own. Once you start outsourcing your thinking, the smooth simplicity of asking AI to solve a problem can be too appealing to stop.

But it is never too late to stop. Our brains are highly resilient, and while rewiring takes time, it’s entirely possible. So close out the ChatGPT tabs, skip over Google’s AI summary, and maybe pick up a newspaper. The future is up to us.

 

Brooke Snyder is co-editor-in-chief at Eastern Mennonite University’s student-run newspaper, The Weather Vane. Hailing from Phoenix, AZ, she is a senior writing studies major with minors in journalism and biology. Although she’s typically busy running the newspaper, she can also be found working as a barista, peer-tutoring and occasionally just hanging out with friends.