I’m worried about my student’s writing. Many professors are doing this these days. A 2025 Inside Higher Ed study found that 85% of undergraduates are using AI in their classes, and the majority are simply having bots write essays for them.
All this has made me very old-fashioned. All my courses are currently held technology-free, and starting in 2024, the exams for the Psych One program I teach at Stanford University are being conducted by Bluebook. Bound paper booklets in which students hand-write their answers to test questions have soared in popularity amid the AI explosion.
Why bother having students write? There are many reasons, but I would like to mention three, ranging from the least convincing to the absolutely most important to me.
1. I need to write to get the job done.
Writing was once a central part of university education, in part because it was a vocational skill. Almost every major and profession requires you to write reports, send emails, share ideas, and complete input. These thousands of words may not have been inspired, but they still had to be created with hands and heads.
I no longer think this is a compelling reason to force college students to write or encourage others to write. If you can conduct most meetings via email, you can automate most emails. Workers, especially the younger generation, will feel little incentive to produce small amounts of artisanal notes.
2. You need to be mindful of your shared environment.
You’ve probably seen the online writing trend. sentence fragment. Bulleted list. Group of 3 people. It’s called “text pollution.”
Text pollution represents all the ways that AI writing hurts those around it. Colleagues at Stanford University have found that people often pass off “AI worklops,” or raw artifacts disguised by chatbots, as clever. Their colleagues have to make sense of long, disorganized and messy materials, and they pay labor taxes.
Social media is full of posts that have the outline of something inspirational, vulnerable, or provocative, but are empty inside. A major TV show has been accused of using AI to generate cliched plot points. Scientific journals are full of low-quality submissions.
Research shows that AI flattens human writing into a useful but boring average. These clichés — “The real question is,” “Here’s what no one’s talking about,” “And honestly?” — signal that no one cares about slowing down. They create an ambient and intellectual irony.
Therefore, we may write as a gift to others, rather than because they request it from us. People love people, and language is the best means created for human interaction. Replacing this with laziness makes everyone worse off. Writing from the heart is a small act of resistance and an act of service to our shared environment.
I personally find this reason very compelling, and I share it with my students, but I don’t expect them all to buy this. They may think that only bastards make an effort when others don’t. They may think that “written environment” is a precious term I coined out of typewriter nostalgia (and they’re not wrong). They may find interaction outside of the written word. And that’s all perfectly fine.
3. You need to keep your mind active
“Cognitive surrender” refers to anything where someone allows an AI to think for them. Researchers found that when given a logical problem, most people who were given the opportunity to use AI did so. And when the bot produced a wrong answer, it noticed it only 20% of the time.
Writing is thinking. Blank pages are scary. Because to fill a blank page, you have to create a storm of ideas and create an order that others can understand. By doing so, we can better understand and use our minds more sharply. Research shows that writing deepens critical thinking and improves memory. Writing about emotional events can help you gain perspective and may even reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression.
We lose all of this when AI writes for us. My students, or you, may protest that they are still thinking, just using AI to produce output. But often, the struggle to put something into words is where the thought happens, not before it happens. Without the friction of verbalizing thoughts, thinking becomes dull. In one study, students who used AI generated more scientific arguments faster, but almost all of them were shallow and of low quality.
Here in San Francisco, I’m sure some people would answer this along the lines of, “Who cares?” In the near future, AI may not only be faster and more knowledgeable than us, but also have deeper scientific insights that will lead to greater advances beyond human imagination.
If such a strange future were to arrive, the way we write might change as well. As workers transitioned from manual labor to white-collar work, more people turned to recreational exercise to maintain physical health despite sedentary jobs. Thanks to AI, we are already able to become more cognitively sedentary, and will become even more so over time. But just as we must take responsibility for our bodies in the age of office work, we must also keep our minds active. Writing is a training ground for human thinking, which we need now more than ever.
Jamil Zaki is a full professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Institute. He and his colleagues study social connections, what they do for us, and how people can learn to connect more effectively. He is the author of “The War for Kindness” and “The Cynic’s Hope.”
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