An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing ‘Cognitive Surrender.’ Universities Are in a Bind.; The New York Times, September 15, 2026

 Mark Arsenault, Dana Goldstein, Alan Blinder and Sarah Mervosh, The New York Times; An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing ‘Cognitive Surrender.’ Universities Are in a Bind.

"The worries that artificial intelligence is degrading education have been building for months. Students are using it for everything, including cheating, and a recent report out of M.I.T. said it is triggering “cognitive surrender.”

Many university leaders are embracing A.I. with enthusiasm anyway.

As A.I. leaders warn about the dangers of their own technology, the dissonance between the optimism of university leaders and the fears of many students and professors may increase. Professors and students are often in a bind about what they should do: Use more A.I. to stay relevant, or dial back to preserve learning and thinking?

While some politicians and A.I. leaders are warning about possible doomsday scenarios for humanity as A.I. models advance, many campus leaders are focused on the existential threat the technology poses to universities."

Nation’s largest school district bans AI in the classroom through 8th grade; CNN, September 2, 2026

 Clare Duffy , CNN; Nation’s largest school district bans AI in the classroom through 8th grade

"New York City is banning the use of generative artificial intelligence for public school students from 2K through 8th grade, part of a larger move to restrict classroom technology in the nation’s largest school district.

The one-year moratorium will affect nearly 600,000 public school students, nearly two-thirds of the district’s total enrollment. As part of the policy rollout, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the district will “discontinue or disable the AI components of more than 38 previously allowed programs that do not meet our new safety and oversight standards.”

Mamdani announced the policy on Wednesday with New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, saying it’s designed to protect students’ critical thinking abilities as well as the relationships between students and teachers."

I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.; The New York Times, August 4, 2026

 BRET STEPHENS, The New York Times; I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.

"This column isn’t so much an argument as it is a plea: Don’t use artificial intelligence to help you write. Never let A.I. do your writing for you.

Don’t use it for school papers, work briefs, letters to your in-laws, speeches at your company gathering or emails (however perfunctory) to your colleagues or friends. Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.

Do none of these things not because they are unethical. Writing with A.I. is unethical when it’s a deception: when you pass off words, ideas and information as your own when they aren’t. An acknowledgment can largely address the problem. Do none of these things, either, because you might be able to learn to write better than an A.I. can. Pretty soon, if not already, you won’t, just as you can’t outrun a car or outplay a chess app.

The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care. We’re already reckoning with the well-documented decline of reading; A.I. is accelerating the decline of writing, ushering us further into what The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch calls our “postliterate age...

A recent examination using A.I.-detection technology of 100 doctoral dissertations found that 56 percent of them contained “more than negligible” A.I.-generated writing and 19 percent had “more than 50 percent A.I.-generated text.” Anecdotal stories from college professors have a finger-in-the-dike feeling with regard to their efforts to hold back the flood of A.I.-generated student papers. It’s easy to treat the problem as one of mere cheating. But cheating doesn’t capture the real scope of the A.I. threat, which isn’t merely to academic integrity or personal betterment but also to democratic self-governance."

The ethical dilemmas of AI; Financial Times, June 5, 2026

 THE EDITORIAL BOARD, Financial Times; The ethical dilemmas of AI

"Leo reminds us while AI may surpass human intelligence, they are not the same thing. AIs “do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean”. Machine learning “does not imply inner growth”. He warns in particular against so-called post- or transhumanist views, because these attempts to improve humanity see human limitations as flaws to get rid of.

The pope’s counterpoint that humanity flourishes “not despite limitations but often through them” is one that many people are becoming more aware of in the case of “cognitive surrender”: the realisation that making things easier through AI can diminish rather than enhance our abilities. It is in a similar vein that the FT commits to always keeping human judgment at the centre of our journalism."