Choosing to Stay Human - by Ethan Mollick

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Choosing to Stay Human<br>...means choosing when and how to use AI.

Ethan Mollick<br>May 26, 2026

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If you go to your favorite social media site, you will find it full of posts that start to look suspiciously similar to each other:

Many of the comments to these posts are also generated by AI. So are an increasing number of academic papers and New York Times opinion articles, and, apparently, award-winning short stories. If you use AI a lot, you probably have noticed how much AI writing is around you (frequent AI users have historically done quite well identifying AI writing), if not, I promise you it is much more than you think.<br>It isn’t just the sameness of the AI writing, though that eventually gets to be tedious enough that I find myself skipping writing on even interesting topics if my internal “AI detector” goes off. It is also that badly prompted AI writing produces very little meaning per word, taking you in intellectual circles instead. We are trained to read well-crafted sentences and intellectual sounding texts as the result of effortful human work and thus pay attention to these AI written comments when we see them. But there is often no human meaning there, these posts are just meaning-shaped attention vampires that take mental effort to decode and give you no equivalent understanding in return1.<br>But using AI for writing has a cost beyond turning off readers, it risks undermining the development of an important human task. I am lucky enough to have been writing for decades, and I have developed my own style which I think shines through whether I am writing a book, a tweet, or a blog post. That style took a lot of super annoying work to get to: good teachers and rewrites and mean online comments all contributed. If the AI does fine writing, I could skip all of that, but I would have done so the cost of giving up something that has turned out to be very important to my career and my happiness.<br>This is not a condemnation of using AI to help with writing in any way. I think AI can be a fantastic tool for good writers (I have AI check all of my writing and roleplay different reader perspectives to see if I missed something important). For those who struggle with communication, AI can help get their ideas across better, and writing may not be thinking for everyone. Plus, a little bit of effort can make AI writing less cliche, more personal, and more worth using (in moderation). So, this is instead a condemnation of using AI as a default, or, even worse, without thinking at all. Balancing using AI with our own mental abilities is going to be a defining challenge of the coming years.<br>Subtle changes, big outcome differences

The clearest place to see this is in education, where two papers with an overlapping research team (including peers at Wharton) do a good job illustrating the difference between using AI to shortcut thinking and to help thinking. The first paper was an experiment at a high school in Turkey with about a thousand students learning math. One group used plain ChatGPT, the other had no AI access. The students with ChatGPT did their homework better and thought they were learning more, but at test time, they underperformed their classmates without ChatGPT. That is because the AI, designed to be a helpful assistant, was really just giving them answers, and actual learning requires mental effort. By short-circuiting effort, you short-circuit learning. That is why the initial results of AI on learning in classrooms can be so worrying.<br>Yet we can see a different result in a second paper from many of the same authors when they ran a five-month Python course across ten high schools in Taipei with close to a thousand students. Students who were given a personalized sequence of problems by an AI tutor scored 0.15 standard deviations higher on a final exam taken without AI help. By some estimates, that’s the equivalent of six to nine months of additional schooling, without any added instruction time or teacher workload. Instead, the AI helped tailor the learning to the student. This fits other work on AI tutoring, suggesting that customized tutors can significantly boost learning when used properly.

This is a relatively small difference in how you use AI and yet it leads to big outcome differences. Worse, human nature leads us to make the wrong choices. Learning requires us to face our own ignorance and do hard intellectual work, and these things are really uncomfortable. Which is why students rate entertaining lectures as more educational than doing hard problems in class, even though they actually learn more from the hard work. To benefit from AI in learning you need to pivot from using AI to solve problems, to pushing you to solve problems yourself.<br>Fortunately, the three major AI companies have tools that provide at least some support for learning by making the AI act more like a tutor. Unfortunately,...