In This College AI Course, Descartes And Rousseau Are On The Syllabus

On the first day of co-teaching their course “AI and the Future of Thinking” at the University of San Francisco, Mark Miller and Larry Ebert asked students to share their reflections on artificial intelligence and how they use it. The instructors — Miller a theologian, Ebert a systems engineer and management consultant who helps companies respond to technological change — expected unbridled AI enthusiasm. That’s not what they got.

The undergraduates, many of whom have experimented extensively with generative AI since the arrival of tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google Gemini, expressed wide-ranging skepticism.

“That was super surprising,” said Miller, the department chair of theology and religious studies at the private Jesuit Catholic university. “I thought they were all going to say ‘I love it. Don’t ever take it away from me.’”

Instead, “at least three-quarters were pretty negative on AI.”

The students mentioned potential job losses, factual inaccuracies, cybersecurity breaches, AI companionship gone awry and the frustration they felt watching peers “cheat” using AI. Some noted the environmental impacts of the giant computing infrastructure needed to train and run AI systems.

But their negativity largely focused on the sense that using AI tools made them, in Ebert’s words, “dumber.”

“Someone compared it to junk food,” Miller said.

AI’s effect on human thought is already the subject of growing research — a widely cited study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business earlier this year found evidence of people increasingly deferring to AI over their own critical thinking, a phenomenon the researchers called “cognitive surrender.”

Steven Shaw, one of the researchers behind the study, noted that because AI tools can complete a range of tasks quickly and competently, it’s tempting for students to associate the technology with good grades.

Shaw sees such courses as “enormously important.”

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