How AI is Impacting College Students Like Me

“What are some ways a 16-year-old girl is similar to Nick Carraway?”That was the first question I ever asked AI. I was a sophomore in high school, stuck on a homework assignment about The Great Gatsby—until my Dad called me over to his computer, itching to show me a new technology called ChatGPT.I gave it the prompt for my essay. In seconds, the screen was filled with flawlessly written ways to compare myself to Gatsby’s narrator. But something didn’t feel right about taking the chatbot’s answer and pretending it was my own. I challenged myself to ignore its suggestions and come up with my own ideas. Within weeks, my high school was buzzing about AI. Some of my fellow students in Mr. Brown’s AP Lit class used it to summarize Robert Frost poems, without bothering to read them. I remained torn. An extra hour to chill at home would’ve been nice, but Frost’s poetry wasn’t especially dense. Plus, Mr. Brown was my favorite teacher, and I felt he was owed the effort of doing the reading myself. We all got similar grades on the assignment, which annoyed me. But in our seminar conversation, I could tell I had a deeper understanding of Frost’s work. In 2024, I got into my dream school, Duke. I couldn’t wait. I longed for the classic collegiate experience my parents described: staying up late discussing philosophy in dorm rooms, reading classic literature in mortared lecture halls, asking life’s biggest questions in the birthplace of scientific discoveries. I quickly learned that at a school like Duke, efficiency matters as much as accomplishment. The faster you complete your coursework, the more time you can put into the extracurricular activities designed to give you an advantage when you enter the work world. Before classes even began, students were running around campus in suits, rushing pre-professional clubs with lower acceptance rates than Duke itself. Talk of summer internships sprouted around the 8-week mark. The question on everyone’s lips was how to get an A while spending as little time on their schoolwork as possible. That question isn’t new. It’s always been possible to cut corners or even cheat. But it used to take some level of effort, craft, and intentional deceit. AI makes it frictionless, adding a game-changing weapon to the achievement arms race, the effects of which reverberate beyond the classroom. Students who offload their coursework to AI can devote themselves to the clubs, internships, and leadership roles that become the standard everyone is measured against when interviewing for jobs. AI tilts the playing field against students who care about using their four precious college years for self-discovery and intellectual exploration.As my homework piled up, I noticed others around me using AI. These were brilliant kids. They had to know something I didn’t. So I made a rule: I would use AI for busywork, but never the subjects I loved. Classmates I admired taught me the art of effective prompts, and I halved my homework time. A boring worksheet that would take my human brain two hours to complete took my augmented intellect only 45 minutes. The arrangement felt perfect: I cut out mindless tasks to preserve my mind for more important assignments. But as the year progressed, it didn’t take long for my rule to crumble. First, I used AI to summarize a dense reading for my philosophy class, a subject I loved, so I could devote more time to writing a contemplative essay. Then, intoxicated by my new efficiency, I asked AI to help me craft an outline for the essay, so I could concentrate on honing my word choice. It nailed the nuances I struggled to capture. I filled in the chatbot’s outline like a paint-by-numbers and submitted the results. I felt proud of the A I received, as if I had unlocked the future of productivity. For my next assignment, I went to the machine first.Judgment day came when I got assigned a paper on political polarization. This was my favorite topic of the semester, and I was eager to leave class so I could start drafting. I wanted to savor the process of writing this piece, so I decided to do it the old-fashioned way: just a blank document and my brain. To my surprise, no words flowed onto the page. After a few minutes of total brain freeze, I remembered that I used to start my drafts by jotting down some relevant opinions, stats, and anecdotes. That came easily—but staring at the jumbled fragments, I realized to my horror that I had no idea how to transform them into a coherent piece of writing. After some intense frustration and effort, my sense of writing eventually came back to me, but my unsettlement lingered. I struggled to justify the hours spent on that essay rather than on my extracurriculars. I also couldn’t believe how much of myself I had lost to AI. It scared me. Like a drug, my relationship with AI had become all-or-nothing. I had to cut it out completely. Immediately, I experienced withdrawal. At times I would get so frustrated at being stuck that I’d open Claude in a browser and then shut down my computer to stop myself. I realized just how little patience I had left for the kind of intellectual challenges I’d been so eager to experience at Duke. What makes AI insidious is that we realize what we’ve lost only in hindsight, when we can no longer summon the perseverance needed for the tasks we used to find pleasurable.It’s now been nearly four years since the release of generative AI, and I’m well into my sophomore year of college. My schedule is thick with extracurriculars and leadership roles, none of which I’m willing to give up. I resolved not to use AI this semester to substitute for doing my own thinking—even in my philosophy course, where our professor requires us to submit 1,000-word reflections on 150 pages of dense philosophical readings every week. Let me be clear: I would never judge a fellow student for using AI. In my eyes, it is a luxury to be able to spend time being curious.I see a crossroads ahead. What kind of life do I want to live? One where I’m willing to sacrifice professional advancement for the sake of intellectual curiosity and passion? Or one where I get praised, get ahead, and remain on the cusp of humanity’s technological progress? It’s tempting to believe that the machine extends my mind, that it’s possible to balance my own intellect with that of the chatbot. But I’ve seen how quickly and quietly AI can rob me of something at my very core. I stand torn between the lures of inner virtue and societal praise. Like Nick Carraway, I am “within and without,” drawn to a glittering new world, yet repulsed by its emotional emptiness. Nick eventually leaves Gatsby’s mansion and returns home to seek a quieter, more fulfilling life. It remains to be seen how much we have in common.