🧠Meet the Students Who Are Saying No to AI
The following article explores why some young people are choosing human learning over machine help.
When ChatGPT appeared in 2022, it set off alarms in classrooms. Educators feared that students would use AI to write essays or complete exams. Three years later, while most students now use AI tools, a small but thoughtful group is choosing something different: a fully human approach to learning.
A 2025 Copyleaks survey found that 90% of college students use AI for schoolwork, often for brainstorming or outlining. Yet students like Marie Norkett and Caleb Langenbrunner from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, are choosing to rely on their own thinking and writing skills.
“What’s the point of going to college if you’re just going to rely on this thing to give you the right answers?” — Marie Norkett
Their reasons range from protecting creativity to preserving community.
đź’¬ A Return to Human Connection
At St. John’s, all students follow a four-year liberal arts curriculum focused on classic texts — Plato, Aristotle, and others. Discussions are central to every class, and that environment discourages AI dependence.
High school senior Ashanty Rosario from New York feels the same:
“We lose a sense of community in the classroom if we aren’t actively engaging with the work we’re given.”
She worries that when students use AI instead of collaborating, it limits everyone’s growth and shared learning.
🎨 Keeping the Humanities Human
As AI reshapes writing, art, and media, students are asking how creative expression survives. Between 2012 and 2022, the number of humanities graduates fell 24%.
“A big part of the humanities and the arts is original thinking and creativity,” Rosario says. “That can’t be replicated by a machine.”
These students argue that culture depends on imagination — and imagination can’t be automated.
🧩 Critical Thinking and Credibility
At the University of New Mexico, philosophy and psychology student Abera Hettinga says using AI would be “a disservice” to his future self. After testing ChatGPT’s logic in class, he found that the chatbot often just predicted “what you’d want it to say.”
As a writing tutor, he sees how overreliance on AI weakens students’ ability to form arguments, organize essays, and craft original ideas.
“[AI] takes away from being able to structure an argument,” Hettinga says. “You lose that crucial ability to brainstorm, to organize, to think.”
🧠Finding Balance
Victor Lee, a professor at Stanford University, notes that cheating rates have held steady at around 60–80% for decades. AI hasn’t created dishonesty — but it’s changed its form.
He believes the solution lies in AI literacy: teaching students when and how to use these tools responsibly, and when to think for themselves. Some teachers are turning back to handwritten essays, while others are guiding students to question AI’s credibility and bias.
For students like Langenbrunner, though, the choice is simple: “I think AI is rather boring,” he laughs. “If I used it to write all my papers, it would take the fun out of learning.”
✨ PSA Reflection
The students who abstain from AI remind us that education is, at its heart, a human journey — built on curiosity, reflection, and conversation. Their choices echo PSA’s mission: exploring how AI can enhance, not replace, the creative and social dimensions of learning.
Source: Christian Science Monitor – “Meet the students who are just saying no to AI,” by Cameron Pugh, Oct. 9, 2025.