Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide
A public policy professor at Harvard and the University of Toronto argues that students using AI to complete writing assignments are wasting their education, while acknowledging that AI writing tools will be a permanent fixture in their professional lives. The piece draws on a framework distinguishing between tasks that build capability and tasks that simply get things done.
Why this matters: The gym analogy is the right one. You go to the gym to get stronger, not just to move weight. Writing is the same. If you use AI to skip the struggle, you skip the learning. That matters beyond school. People who never practiced the thinking behind writing will be worse at the judgment calls that AI cannot make for them. The deeper issue is not whether to use AI. It is knowing which parts of your own thinking you can afford to hand off and which parts you cannot.
Who should care: General readers · AI governance · Policy
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