Embrace AI. It’s here to stay.

For the first time in my now seven semesters at Penn, all of my classes are “no tech,” meaning the professors have disallowed laptops for any purpose in the classroom. Each of these policies is accompanied by a strict and uncompromising ban on the use of artificial intelligence for any reason in the course. While academics and collegiate administrators have been pessimistic about AI for some time, this turn marks a new extreme in how they catastrophize AI.

In practice, this means that many of my courses, all of which are in the social sciences, no longer ask students to write out-of-class essays or research papers. Professors have instead begun to rely on in-class handwritten assignments and exams. That is an unsatisfactory solution. In trying to prevent students from cheating critical thinking, our faculty have taken critical thinking off the table completely. 

As AI, distracting technology, and whatever comes next are introduced, pedagogy should be innovated, not regressed. Through outright AI bans, Penn’s faculty have enforced a Luddite-like approach to learning that has been outdated for decades. Instead, our University should focus on how AI can be a useful tool. Its embrace is almost universal elsewhere, and it isn’t going to magically disappear anytime soon.

At least one college is getting it right: Dartmouth. Earlier this month, Dartmouth President Sian Beilock offered her perspective on AI as an educational tool. She compares reluctance to embrace AI to the anticipation one experiences before an important exam. We sit squarely in that anticipatory phase: instead of dealing with AI, professors are just trying to make it go away. A more productive approach, Beilock says, would be for educators to teach their students “how to approach AI critically.”

The truth is that AI is very much here to stay. Virtually every workplace that Penn graduates frequent is being revolutionized by generative tools. We are nearing an era where AI fluency is an employability skill as crucial as professionalism and technical knowledge. Penn can make a difference by teaching students how to responsibly and effectively use AI in their academic work. It’s a pedagogical necessity like any other. 

We lose so much by pretending that AI doesn’t exist. These tools have given us an opportunity to challenge students in new ways. They’ve also introduced a responsibility for universities to universally adapt and help their students work through our new AI-native reality. AI will be available in any job, schooling, or real-world setting that our graduates encounter. It’s illogical for it to be prohibited at the very place that intends to train them for postgraduate success.

One uncomfortable truth must be confronted: if your at-home essay assignment could be satisfactorily completed by ChatGPT, then your assignment is no longer valuable. Instead, assignments and content should require engagement from the human mind. Then, a student’s use of AI shouldn’t be of concern. When calculators were invented, humans moved from computation to calculus. AI should be a similar opportunity: human critical thinking shouldn’t go away, it should become more advanced.

I challenge social science, humanities, and liberal arts professors to think critically about what AI is useful for and what it isn’t. Human judgment is evolving. A computer can generate a lot of written content, but only a human mind can pick out what information is important and accurate. When used correctly, AI has been proven to enhance the quality of your work without compromising the learning process. Its use is essential.

Anti-AI and no tech policies have made me a fundamentally worse student. Without long-form writing, the ability to take in-class notes quickly, and the leeway to ask Claude for clarification, I simply haven’t been gaining as much from my classes. That’s a disappointing reality for my final year at Penn. But, we still have time to put our best AI-generated foot forward. An open and responsible embrace of AI tools is Penn’s next step in providing the world-class liberal arts education we are promised.

JACK LAKIS is a College senior studying political science and communication from Kennesaw, Ga. He formerly served as the Opinion Editor of the 141st Board and currently serves as the Editorial Board Chair of the 142nd Board. His email is jlakis@sas.upenn.edu.