After considering the MIT report on generative AI in higher education and thinking about how I use Ai in my own work, I think that college students should use AI, but only as a tool to help them learn. The MIT report found that “Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support” (Kosmyna et al., 2025). It also found that It also found that “the LLM group’s participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels” (Kosmyna et al., 2025). These made me think about how using AI too much could affect how much students actually learn.

For my process, I thought about how I use AI for school. I think it’s useful for explaining things I don’t understand, organizing information, studying, and checking work to see if answers are correct. I also decided that I wouldn’t use AI to write an entire assignment that is supposed to show what I understand. I wanted to see how AI could help me learn without doing the work for me.

Artifacts

I asked Chat GPT to explain how to find the standard deviation for a Data Science course and give me an example. I used the response to help me understand the concept instead of just using AI to complete my assignment. It shows how I can use Ai to help while still doing my own work.

This project showed me that AI can still be useful depending on how I use it. It can help me understand things faster, but it can also make it easy to stop thinking for myself. I also leasrend that studets do not al have the same access to AI or the same understanding of how to use it. Going forward Ill continue doing the work myself and use AI when I actually need help instead of letting it do the work for me.

Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X.-H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. MIT Media Lab.