Yes, AI helps students cheat. But it’s causing an even bigger crisis | Opinion

I failed math twice. In middle school, I tripped over numbers like shoelaces, and Mrs. Jarvis, as formidably stern as she was stout, bemoaned my complete inability to memorize multiplication tables.

In high school, Mr. Gross, who coached football and did pushups between classes, regarded my grunge-slacker approach to long division as a moral failure. Both assured me, “You won’t always have a calculator with you.” How quaint.

I just wrapped up teaching a course on Religion and AI and here’s the reality at TCU and, I suspect, on college campuses across the country: Many, if not most, of our students are using AI on most of their coursework. In most instances, we – their professors — can’t tell.

A colleague recently remarked, “These days, I’m thrilled when I see a typo!” It means, of course, that the student actually did the work, rather than farming it out to AI.

As my colleagues and I fret over AI-use policies and rework assignments to stave off banal, lukewarm AI slop, here’s what I observed in my course: The deep problem with AI on campus isn’t that students are using it to cheat or do coursework, it’s that these tools are compromising genuine human-to-human connection.

Over the course of the semester, as we worked our way through the Turing Test, the “Cyborg Manifesto,” brains in vats and what it’s like to be a bat, it became clear that the real heart of the course wasn’t AI. My beloved syllabus with its readings, theories, and topics wasn’t what the students were really engaging. They were engaging each other.

Face-to-face encounters were the real lessons. The course content was just an excuse to come together twice a week in a small room in Beasley Hall to sit face-to-face with peers and talk, laugh, cry, joke, and share; to simply be human with other humans.

AI remains an ‘it,’ even in a relationship

In his book “I and Thou,” Jewish thinker Martin Buber describes two types of relationships: I-Thou and I-It. I-It relationships are those we have with objects and people we objectify. I-Thou relationships are those we have with our fellow travelers in life, whom we encounter in their full, beautiful, messy — and beautifully messy — person-ness.

For Buber, a genuine encounter with another carries mutuality and sanctity: “My Thou affects me, as I affect it.” Not only do we hear what the other says, but we take it inside like a sacrament. We feel it. We let it impact us, change us, raise our pulse, make us grin, or wet our eyes.

AI is an It, not a Thou. Until it becomes sentient, which is a whole other topic, our relationships to AI are I-It relationships. As people increasingly form strong bonds with various AI platforms — including romantic connections — this has become a mildly controversial position. It should not be. AI is an It. AI does a frighteningly good simulation of a Thou, but it remains an It and our relationships with it are I-It relations.

As my students grew more comfortable with one another over the course of the semester, I witnessed a transformation. The first few weeks, they sat around our seminar table, politely engaging the course content, offering relevant reflections, dutifully citing the readings. However, it gradually became clear that while they were still (mostly) doing the readings, the focus of our conversations — what they cared about — was conversing itself; dialogue for dialogue’s sake. I-Thou encounters.

When I tried to wrangle them back to the day’s topic, they inevitably wandered into the greener pastures of relationships, achievements, heartaches, traumas, family dynamics, hobbies and weekend antics. By the end of the semester, it was clear that I was the one who was learning the real lesson: Our students are lonely.

TCU is ranked among the happiest campuses in the country. And for good reason. We have a beautiful campus, excellent facilities, top-notch sports, world-class faculty, and a well-run administration, all in the vibrant city of Fort Worth. Yet precisely because things are so seemingly perfect, it’s easier to farm out the beautifully messy work of being human to AI than risk the vulnerability that genuine I-Thou relationships demand.

AI makes college students fear they’re falling behind

The problem with AI on campus isn’t (just) cheating or using it to skirt the actual work of earning an education, it’s that it ratchets up expectations of perfection and achievement. If everyone else is using AI to do their coursework, not using it amounts to falling behind. The result is that no one is comfortable admitting that they’re struggling. That they’re human.

If AI is here to stay, then professors need a pedagogical paradigm shift. Memorizing multiplication tables and mastering long division may have inherent value, as my teachers said. But I also always have a calculator. If AI can do what we formerly asked of our students, perhaps we need to change what we ask of them.

And to know what to ask of them, we have to listen. If we do, I suspect what they’ll tell us, explicitly or implicitly, is that they need to (re)learn how to be in I-Thou relationships. Such relations are the cornerstone of a liberal arts education and the soul of every religion.

J. Sage Elwell is a professor of religion and art at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.

This story was originally published December 19, 2025 at 4:41 AM.