At the start of the school year, there will always be changes: new dorm rooms, new classes, and new faces on campus.

This year, all Harvard students also got a new study buddy: ChatGPT.

In an email sent to the college, Gillian B. Pierce ’88, associate dean of undergraduate education, academic programs and policy, announced that students in an effort to explore the use of AI to enhance Harvard’s teaching and research mission. Access to ChatGPT Edu will be given. “Since then, I’ve heard overwhelmingly positive AI policies in every class I’ve taken, encouraging the use of ChatGPT to aid conceptual understanding.

Oh A recent study A Harvard physics class, for example, highlights the use of AI to help students learn more in a short period of time by encouraging them to interact with a personalized chatbot. Their AI tool, called PS2 Pal, presents questions that students answer and receive interactive, personalized feedback.

The rapid integration of AI into almost all of my classes has come as quite a shock. I rarely used ChatGPT before the last two weeks due to a paralyzing fear of violating academic integrity policies, misunderstanding the accuracy of information collected, or misquoting the tool’s support. What did

But already, PS2 Pal has become a good friend of mine – so much so that I don’t feel the need to go to office hours, open a textbook, or deal with problems with colleagues. Any basic conceptual question I have is reliably answered within seconds.

I am worried about this change.

In the past weeks, the way I approach my classes has been less personal. I can do my entire assignment sitting at my desk with ChatGPT answering questions I have about inverting matrices or debugging code. There seems to be no need to meet up with friends and discuss class work because talking to ChatGPT can help me get better faster.

While I am in no way precluded from accessing resources such as office hours and peer tutoring, the sheer convenience of ChatGPT makes it a more attractive resource to turn to for help.

As I do this, I know I’m getting a single solution to any question, rather than the five or ten different ways I might think if I asked a group of colleagues the same questions. ask In short, I am concerned that we may lose diversity in the ways we learn and interact with course content because students rely on the ChatGPT approach alone.

I definitely learned a lot from observing what my classmates were doing right or wrong, and why they approached a question in a certain way. It helps me think about concepts from different perspectives. With ChatGPT, any question I have usually comes with a scripted answer.

Learning to access these different perspectives in primary sources such as textbooks and papers is something else that ChatGPT makes obsolete. Students can get answers about any topic by asking GPT to summarize a source, rather than engaging with it themselves through libraries or journals. As we move towards relying on AI for information, I also worry that, while taking what ChatGPT provides as fact, we will need to critically read, evaluate and apply information. Essential skills are lost.

In this post-Covid era, with (partially) online education here to stay, digital tools have become essential in the classroom. Programs such as Kahoot, an online quizzing system, and Quizlet, a website with digital flashcards, truly enhance the educational experience. But ChatGPT extends significantly beyond these tools – it’s increasingly resembling an instructor.

As with any new technology, it’s healthy to retain some skepticism about AI’s new role. While Harvard’s incorporation of AI into the classroom may be a much-needed pilot study, we must not forget the importance of latent learning that occurs in peer-to-peer educational settings and manual exploration and problem-solving. By persevering through the motto of .

Struggling through classes, and spending time discussing concepts with peers is important to developing skills in thinking flexibly about problems and arriving at unique and original solutions. Courses that use or are considering using AI as tutors should remember to encourage students to engage with each other and with course staff. ChatGPT is a wonderful new technology, but it is no substitute for the hard work of learning in person.

Sandhya Kumar ’26, a Crimson editorial editor, holds a joint concentration in molecular and cellular biology and statistics at Winthrop House.