Guest Column: Artificial intelligence and the ethics of lightening your cognitive load

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Writing is hard. Irrespective of your discipline of study or line of work, your age, or natural talent, human beings have struggled with the never-ending complexities of writing the very moment it was invented. In fact, our culture and lives today have been shaped by countless writers before us who recorded their own experiences and culture.

For example, consider the creation of one of the first alphabets. Phoenicia was a collection of city-states scattered along the Eastern Mediterranean Coast, well-known for its extensive trading networks. They had previously relied on cuneiform and hieroglyphics for writing, but found them difficult in practice to convey complex trading messages accurately. After repeated miscommunications, they began communicating by assigning a phonetic sound to a symbol. The combinations of symbols to form words gave rise to one of the earliest alphabets.

Just as writing systems evolved by counteracting stressors to meet the needs of historical cultures, the role writing plays in our lives today has been altered by the introduction of artificial intelligence. In academic writing culture, it has become increasingly common for a student to type “write me an essay about… ” into an AI generator and subsequently submit the result as the assignment. It has led to widespread panic among educators about how to regulate this practice, as it undermines one of the very purposes we strive for students to achieve: developing critical thinking skills and retaining knowledge.

Still, the unaddressed question remains: As concern over the use of AI in the classroom intensifies, are we only treating one symptom of the illness by villainizing it rather than confronting the conditions that lead students to rely on it?

To understand why students turn to AI, we must first examine how the learning process materializes and how it has historically been shaped through effort and cognitive strain. For instance, Medieval Monks in Europe engaged in a tremendously cognitively demanding form of learning: manuscript transcription. In moments of time-pressured stress, Monks would often make consequential alterations to the original wording of ancient documents that did not translate directly. This choice contributed directly to the development of modern English.

This stressful challenge exemplifies neural plasticity and the learning process. In other words, it refers to the brain’s ability to adapt to various stimuli (often through mistakes), translate them into new skills, solve cognitive problems, and support long-term memory. Systematic engagement with complex material through writing promotes the formation of durable neural pathways, enabling deeper comprehension of the topic. When this process is bypassed by utilizing artificial intelligence, the potential for cognitive development is significantly reduced.

However, with all learning comes differentiating individual strengths and external factors that can substantially affect how you process information. Cognitive load refers to your total amount of mental effort available to process information in your brain. Your mental effort could be depleted by factors such as insufficient sleep, stressful personal life events, and a high intrinsic load.

When a college student is navigating the never-ending array of adulthood difficulties, balancing complex classwork, mental health, and maintaining some semblance of a social life, their working memory can become significantly depleted. Juxtaposing your already depleted working memory from your personal life with the task of structuring grammar, paragraphs, sentences, and information can result in a high cognitive load. If your working memory is filled to capacity, the information you process will be handled differently. This could manifest as memory issues, task paralysis, slowed thinking, and increased mistakes in your essay.

When experiencing these symptoms while writing, AI ceases to be a tool for convenience and morphs into a means of survival. Humans tend to prioritize the ultimate ‘end’ over the ‘mean. ’ This could be anything: graduation, love, success. Careful consideration of the ethical means to achieve your goals fluctuates. Students become less concerned with making the ‘right’ choice and more concerned with making any choice at all. AI is not always used out of laziness, but as a response to overwhelming cognitive demands.

So, how can we combat this illness rather than address the symptom? One would be encouraging the development of the writing process in the classroom. A personalized writing process that incorporates the planning, drafting, revising, and editing stages can be quintessential for reducing stress and developing your writing skills. When writing, ensure you take regular breaks so your mind can breathe. The Pomodoro method could be used with 25-minute work intervals and 5-minute breaks, or 45-minute work intervals and 10-minute breaks, or whatever best fits your attention span. Chunking, or breaking down information into smaller components, can reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed. These are just a few strategies out of many. Find what works best for you!

Writing is hard. This sentence has been true for humans throughout our history, and it remains true today. When the technological innovation of the Printing Press in 1440 made printed documents more accessible, the need for human thinking did not change, but the support surrounding it did. Today, the goal is not to replace writers with machines, but to better support the humans behind the words.

Aristotle articulates in Nicomachean Ethics that “For a doctor does not deliberate about whether to cure, nor an orator whether to persuade, nor a politician whether to produce good order; nor does anyone else deliberate about his end. Rather they establish an end and then go on to think about how and by what means it is to be achieved. ” As Aristotle suggests, we do not deliberate about our ends, but about the means to reach them. Students today have not abandoned their goals. They still seek success, understanding, and achievement. What has shifted is their relationship to the process. In a system that prioritizes outcomes over process, we must consider: Are students given the means to develop their learning and writing processes, or does modern-day academia care explicitly about the end?

Abigail Hoffman is a writing fellow at Utah State University. 

— abigail.hoffman@usu.edu