Dear Editor,

Thanks for your Sept 4 article “We have a lot of opinions”: How the FSHA faculty are responding to AI by Lucia Lee.

Since the public release of Generative AI tools in 2022, we have jumped head first in a new technological paradigm. The newness of GenAI brings not only astounding new products and solutions to difficult problems, but also confusion and unintended consequences. I would love to see the Shield make writing about AI in all aspects of our lives a more regular feature. The article by Lee starts the conversation for us by recognizing that GenAI use in education is complex and the long-term impacts of GenAI use by students and teachers is being discovered in new ways day by day. If Lee’s headline had been, “What are FSHA faculty doing about AI?”, I would make two comments: 1) An equally, if not more, important question is “What are FSHA students doing about AI?” and 2) the answer to both is Not Enough.

New research into the effects of GenAI use by students is published almost daily and we have all seen the headlines. “Frequent AI use negatively affects Critical Thinking” (Gerlich, 2025), “Unguided GenAI use decreases higher order cognitive skills” (Alubthane, 2026), “Knowledge workers report reduced confidence and reduced cognitive effort” (Lee, 2025), “Cognitive debt accumulates when using AI assistance” (Kosmyna, 2025) are just a few peer-reviewed research studies recently published.

For high school students, these studies become more important since teen brains are still in the development phase and ideas like cognitive debt and decreased critical thinking have life long implications. And while careful use of GenAI can function as a cognitive amplifier, few students have the experience or understanding to avoid using GenAI as a cognitive substitute.

One example is when students commonly use GenAI to increase the “efficiency” or speed of some part of their learning process. But learning is rarely about efficiency, and the benefit of using any tool to speed learning ALWAYS comes with a cost. Instead of efficiency, we should be seeking out cognitive friction. Classes and assignments should help us find the places where we don’t know stuff, explicitly challenging ourselves and our brains to struggle toward understanding.

The question of “Should we or Should we not” use AI on this assignment, or in school at all, is the wrong question. Instead, students should be asking “Why am I in school?” as the first step toward deciding what kind of future-person or what kind of future-thinker you want to be. Follow that up with “How effective do I want my brain to be?” and “Who is going to help me get there?”.

What are teachers and students doing about AI? We teachers should be designing lessons that challenge brains to work in ways students are not initially comfortable with, maybe in ways that are not efficient at all (note: I think the faculty at FSHA do a pretty good job with this one). And teachers should be talking together every chance we get about how we are providing opportunities for cognitive friction, and sharing when we discover GenAI use that functions as a cognitive amplifier. You students should be seeking and embracing cognitive friction, even though it is annoying and you are sometimes too busy or too tired to lock in. We should all be talking together about learning and cognition every day. This way, when we do decide to use GenAI as a tool, we can be intentional, explicitly considering the cost to your brain development.

Ty Buxman

Mr. Buxman is the Chair of the Research Department and teaches classes in Science, Computer Science & Engineering. He is usually in Rm 34 at lunch and always interested in talking about technology and learning. Stop by and say “Can we talk about AI?”

Sources:

Alubthane, F. O. (2026). Amplifier or substitute? A systematic review of generative AI’s impact on higher-order cognitive skills among university students. Frontiers in Psychology, 17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1863931

Gerlich, M. (2025). AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking. Societies, 15(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006

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. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.08872, 4, 206.

Lee, H. P., Sarkar, A., Tankelevitch, L., Drosos, I., Rintel, S., Banks, R., & Wilson, N. (2025, April). The impact of generative AI on critical thinking: Self-reported reductions in cognitive effort and confidence effects from a survey of knowledge workers. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-22).