It's the Brian Lowe show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

So picture this.

It's late.

You're a college student at your desk or in the library,

and you're working away on a paper

on maybe Shakespeare that you've been putting off for weeks.

Writing it is hard, but along the way, you surprise yourself.

As you write, you work something out on your own.

Vala, you've learned something about Shakespeare and maybe yourself.

But as students use AI tools like ChatGPT for

just about everything, including their essays, those moments might be going extinct.

Writing is hard. ChatGPT practically eliminates the difficulty of writing altogether,

or it can, depending on how you use it. But without the magic of

those little eureka moments and the enrichment that comes with them, what does that mean for an

education, especially in the humanities? Even if you get all A's, is AI just a tool that can help students

with learning and make them more efficient, maybe even

leave them more time to think? Or is it outsourcing and diminishing actual critical thinking?

Joining us now to try to answer some of those questions and we'll invite you in, students,

college professors, others to join

this conversation. Is Hua Shu, a New Yorker staff writer, who was also a professor of English at

Bard College and author of the memoir, Stay True, published in 2022. His new piece in The New Yorker

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