Read below the essay by Asia Haslam for the University Council Essay Competition 2026 themed “Voices, Power and Responsibility in a Changing World”.
The prompt for the essay she chose is: AI and Education: “… the real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.” – B.F. Skinner in Contingencies of Reinforcement: A theoretical analysis (1969).
As artificial intelligence can now generate answers, essays, and ideas in seconds, reflect on the difference between thinking and producing. How can young people ensure they remain active critical thinkers in an age of intelligent machines?
In our current age of generative artificial intelligence, an essay, an image, or a software program can be produced very quickly. Tasks that once required a certain level of expertise and a great deal of time can be accomplished in seconds. I think that these advances in technology make the creation process more valuable than the end result.
One of my favorite things to do is to knit. I love to find a beautiful pattern, pick out suitable yarn, and spend hours making something by hand. I recently made a sweater from a vintage pattern that took me about six months to knit. It took me hundreds of hours of effort, and I even had to take parts of it out several times, but I found it very gratifying tomake the sweater from scratch. Many might wonder–how could all that work be worth it? Knitting can be done easily and cheaply by a machine. I could have bought a sweater for the same cost of the wool yarn and saved myself a lot of time, effort, and frustration.
For me, it was worth it for two reasons. The human effort I put into making the sweater increased its value as a gift to a beloved family member. Also, the result was a unique sweater that I could not have found in any store. I think these points hold true even though the “end result” of my knitting was imperfect. I was off by a stitch in a few places, but tome, at least, this sweater is so much more valuable than any “perfect” sweater I could have bought from a store.
I think this principle applies to many tasks which could be completed by a machine. An article can be written by alarge language model (LLM) in less than a minute, but such an article has no human effort put into it and is absolutely generic—just like a sweater purchased from a fast-fashion chain.
I don’t think an LLM-generated article could be worth taking the time to read because there is no human effort(thinking) involved. An author can include their personal experience or an interview with an expert or someone else who has a valuable perspective on the topic. An LLM, on the other hand, cannot by definition share personal experience or information gleaned from personal interviews.
In addition, such an article would not be unique. Any opinions it offers would be an amalgamation of the model’straining materials and information it found online. It could draw on the writings of Kant, for example, but it could not provide any new philosophical theories. No matter how correct the grammar was, I would not want to waste my time reading an article like that.
If a technically correct article (assuming, very generously, that there were no “hallucinations” from the LLM) could be worthless, then maybe we should change the way we value a creation. A student can generate an essay that fits their teacher’s specifications without learning anything. On the other hand, a student could spend hours researching andwriting an essay that has some flaws in the grammar and logical structure, but learn important information that they will remember for many years. I think this is a clear example of the necessity of valuing the creation process over the end result.
If we want young people to learn, we should allow them to make mistakes. Expecting perfection incentivizes students who are struggling to look for outside tools to do the work for them. If we instead valued the thinking and creation process and focused on providing helpful feedback to students when they made mistakes (rather than just penalizing them), I think they would feel much more motivated to try doing something hard or new by themselves.
One difficulty in implementing this kind of change is that it might require more work from teachers and professors than providing the instructions for an essay assignment or proctoring an exam and grading the results. Unfortunately, evaluation methods that reward students for perfection and penalize them for error (especially ones done on a computer or taken home) mean that many students will be tempted to use new LLM-based tools to complete the workfor them—sidestepping the learning process entirely. Some teachers are changing their evaluation style to prevent cheating, which is why now is the perfect time for teachers to introduce a new style of learning that places the value where it should be–on learning, rather than perfect performance.
