AI is everywhere. This is a guide for students — my students, your students — and anyone who would like to resist the lure of AI. The more you know about large-language model (LLM) AI, the more reasons you discover to avoid using it — or, at least, to limit your use.
So. Here are 9 ways to resist the lure of LLM AI:
Unwilling to spend 10 minutes on the above video? OK, then, here’s a summary of my 9 points, all of which are addressed to my students:
- Writing is a form of thinking. If you outsource your thinking, you don’t learn.
- AI knows nothing. Because AI cannot think. It cannot reason. It merely passes off statistical pattern-matching as reason. So, if you think AI will get you the right answer, you’re rolling the dice.
- Your writing has a voice. AI’s voice sounds like an excessively cheerful advertising copywriter. What you have to say is far more interesting than AI’s eloquent BS.
- AI cannot close-read. Because, again, AI cannot think.
- LLM AI are plagiarism machines. Are you comfortable using a product built on the theft of others’ work?
- Are you comfortable being used by AI? It is currently using you to improve the product. If you come to rely on it, how will you cope when you have to pay for it — or pay more for it —?
- What does relying on LLM AI do to your brain? When you stop doing something, you gradually un-learn how to do it. If you outsource your thinking to LLM AI, what will happen to your ability to think? If we outsource our thinking, we outsource our humanity. I want to see your humanity.
- What is LLM AI doing to the planet? In 2022, its data centers consumed 640 terawatt hours — which made it the 11th largest electricity consumer in the world, between the nations of Saudi Arabia (371 terawatt hours) and France (463 terawatt hours).
- Canvas is adding AI, promising to make grading easier. I will never use it. And I will disable it for as long as Canvas allows. Using it would say that I think so little of your ideas that I’m outsourcing my job to a robot. But learning requires my active involvement. So, I ask my students: if you are tempted to use AI, think of what using it would say to me.
Sources:
Noman Bashir, Priya Donti, James Cuff, Sydney Sroka, Marija Ilic, Vivienne Sze, Christina Delimitrou, and Elsa Olivetti. “The Climate and Sustainability Implications of Generative AI.” MIT, 27 Mar. 2024.
Brian Calvert, “AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning.” Vox, 28 Mar. 2024.
Joyeeta Gupta, Hilmer Bosch, and Luc van Vliet, “AI’s excessive water consumption threatens to drown out its environmental contributions.” The Conversation, 21 Mar. 2024.
Sarah Huddleston, “Instructors Will Now See AI Throughout a Widely Used Course Software.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 23July 2025.
Marcus Hutchins, “Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too.” Malware Tech, 4 Aug. 2025.
Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.” June 2025.
Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh, Hooman Shahrokhi, Oncel Tuzel, Samy Bengio, Mehrdad Farajtabar, “GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models.” Apple Machine Learning Research, Oct. 2024.
Meghan O’Rourke. “I Teach Creative Writing. This is What AI Is Doing to Students.” New York Times 18 July 2025.
Alex Reisner, “Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI.” The Atlantic 20 Mar. 2025.
Parshin Shojaee, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh, Maxwell Horton, Samy Bengio, Mehrdad Farajtabar, “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity.” Apple Machine Learning Research, June 2025.
Peiqi Sui, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Philippe Laban, Dean Murphy, Joseph P. Dexter, Richard Jean So, Samuel Baker, Pramit Chaudhuri, “KRISTEVA: Close Reading as a Novel Task for Benchmarking Interpretive Reasoning.” Cornell University, 3 June 2025.
Adam Zewe, “Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact.” MIT News, 17 Jan. 2025
Every fall, I seem to be making a new video on the subject. Here’s the one from 2024.
And here is an expanded article version and the related blog post:
- “Why Not Use AI to Do Your Homework?” (Teachers & Writers Magazine, 15 Oct. 2024)
- “Why Not Write with AI?” (20 Aug. 2024)
Janet