A university professor says the biggest risk from artificial intelligence may not be rogue robots. It may be the slow loss of our ability to think for ourselves.
Professor Seun Kolade of Sheffield Hallam University made the case to the Daily Mail. Researchers call the idea “human enfeeblement.” It describes a gradual decline in critical thinking, planning and even emotional skills as people hand more tasks to machines.
For Kolade, the issue goes well beyond students cheating. “This is not simply a question of cheating. It is a question of human formation,” he said.
Schools and universities are already struggling to stop students from letting tools like ChatGPT write their assignments. Kolade decided to test how hard that is. He used ChatGPT to answer typical university essay questions.
The results surprised him. The AI produced original, well-written essays that markers scored highly. Turnitin, the standard plagiarism checker, failed to flag most of them.
That, he says, is what makes the problem so hard to see. “It doesn’t look like failure. A student who hands their thinking to a machine can produce better-looking work than before,” he explained.
In other words, the damage hides behind good grades. A student can look more capable on paper while practising less of the thinking that education is meant to build.
Kolade is not alone in raising the concern. A colleague at the same university, Dr Samuele Vinanzi, has argued that over-reliance on AI is the more realistic danger. In his view, small everyday decisions to lean on a machine could add up over time. People may then struggle to think without it and to question the systems they depend on.
Kolade says he will explore the subject further in his upcoming column.
