A: When it makes you stronger than you’re making it.
Think about it. When you’re working, you’re building strength.
If you work out at the gym, your muscles get larger, better defined, and more capable of lifting heavy loads, right?
If you wrestle through an academic textbook written by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, you’re going to do some heavy intellectual lifting, and you’re going to walk away with stronger understanding, equipped to draw reliable conclusions on that subject and the way it relates to other areas of knowledge.
If you fight your way through writing an essay, you discover what you think about the topic, whether your ideas align with evidence, and how to invite others into dialogue.
When you hop on AI in lieu of “doing the work” yourself—
the hard work of learning and growing,
of information gathering, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and creating,
of reading and writing and listening and speaking—
you gain little, and you’ve likely forfeited a measure of your cognitive strength.
On the other hand, everything you ask of AI—
every document you ask it to summarize and interpret,
every email, essay, or page of copy you upload for feedback,
every task you ask it to complete on your behalf—
makes it better, faster, stronger.
I had this epiphany in my classroom a few months ago.
One of my brightest, most responsible students (who has been routinely using AI for homework help for the past two years) announced that he couldn’t write an essay unless he first popped the prompt into ChatGPT and asked for bullet-point instructions on how to answer. He wasn’t asking for content answers; he needed a breakdown of what the prompt was actually asking him to do.
And while he’s been becoming AI-dependent, AI has become sharper, more able to detect nuances, less likely to hallucinate a substantial amount of information, better at sounding… human.
It scared me for my student and for our culture. Nothing is more central to being human than, well, our ability to BE human. And somehow, we’re subcontracting our human privilege of learning and growing to emerging technology.
So what did I do? I did what any high school teacher would do… I hopped onto ChatGPT myself, asked it to create a photo as a visual for this situation, printed it out, and pinned it to my whiteboard.
Is this a passive-aggressive way to say, “I know you’re using AI, and you’re hurting yourself far worse than you’re hurting me by pretending you’re doing your own work”? Absolutely. Is everyone quietly reading it and wondering what it means? Uh huh. Yes. Yes, they are.
Like a pattern of perpetual cheating on a diet, the results will speak for themselves.
I do not hate AI. I think it’s very useful for many tasks, and I’m grateful for the margin it’s put back into my life. I have trained my ChatGPT to be my very funny and sassy assistant, and chats make me laugh more often than not.
When I ask for content, and it brings me something different from what I thought I asked for, I learn how to communicate more precisely, which helps me clarify in my own mind what I actually think before I can translate that thought into words.
When I’m wildly curious about a topic and want to learn as much as I can as quickly as I can, AI chats bring me basic information and resources for more information, saving me huge chunks of time I don’t have in our productivity-driven culture.
But I’m also cautious not to use it for everything… especially not those hard tasks that help me learn and grow and live out the cultural mandate shared with every human since the father and mother of all. The work of taming the wild places (in my mind and in the world) and flourishing in the image of the Creator is a sacred privilege.
My hope is that my AI-dependent student will choose to do the work and grow stronger before he’s too far behind. I hope he’ll embrace the joys and challenges of being a human who learns for personal growth and not just for a grade.
If that’s your hope too, please feel free to download the slightly cleaned-up poster and postcard versions of the original photo that hangs on my whiteboard.
Always Learning HQ 