AI Cheating as a Failure to Love
Why students need to cultivate the virtue of love in education
Learning to live with AI in higher education has not been easy. While some advocates are praising the pedagogical possibilities, many professors are concerned about rampant misuse of AI. Students are using AI to write entire papers for them, to summarize readings, to do their math questions, to create presentations, to do any kind of homework assigned. And the concern by professors is that students are merely offloading the cognitive work onto large language models and passing it off as their own thinking. In response, some argue that we just need to adapt, that AI is inevitable and students are going to use this technology no matter what, so we might as well help them offload their cognitive abilities as little and as ethically as possible. Other professors I know have outright bans on the technology in their classrooms. But what if the core of the problem is not the introduction of a new technology, but a profound lack of virtue? What if at the root of students’ misuse of AI to avoid studying is a fundamental lack of love?
Insofar as contemporary education is motivated by a drive for maximal efficiency, what Jacques Ellul calls technique, rather than love of wisdom and knowledge, students will naturally and quite reasonably gravitate towards tools that are the pinnacle of efficiency. But if we teach students to love what is lovely in their subjects, they will see the futility and hollowness in using AI to avoid thinking for themselves.
Contemporary students typically enter college with the mindset that their goal is to complete a certain set of tasks as efficiently as possible to graduate, preferably (but not always necessarily) with a high GPA. One major driver of this ideology is the high cost of college education, which pressures students to finish not just on time but early. Many students come into college with college credit from high school to expedite the process. Another driver is the shifting economy, which has only grown worse with the expansion of AI. Students are anxious to enter the marketplace and begin their careers as soon as possible. Finally, the way we have rewarded young people for the last few decades has not been for their pursuit of wisdom or knowledge, but for their GPA (which is often inflated) and their extracurricular accolades. So they have been conditioned to believe that their worth is tied to their performance on assessments, not their virtuous pursuit of wisdom or even character growth.
In colleges and universities, students are typically taught by Ph.Ds, “doctors of philosophy,” a word which literally means “love of wisdom.” It ought to be the case that in each class, these professors are inviting students to love wisdom, which always includes truth, beauty, and goodness—transcendent realities. When a teacher makes a compelling case for why students should love a subject, students are invited to seek the wisdom in that subject out of passion, out of a desire in their hearts and minds, rather than out of a drive to efficiently pass the course.
Even better, teachers should model their own love of a subject for students, showing them how and why to love what is lovely, praise what is praiseworthy, delight in what is delightful, and so on. Math teachers who get excited about proofs do this. Historians who get excited about stories in history do this. Their love of their subject is contagious. They embody what loving wisdom looks and feels like. That latter part is important. Many students have never felt a love for a subject before in school. They have only experienced school with dread. They need someone to model the emotions of passion for a subject for them so they can emulate those emotions themselves.
I have witnessed this in teaching difficult modernist poetry to skeptical students. As I embody my love for the poetry and communicate that love and invite them into the dance of reading and interpretation, they come to see and believe that there is something lovely where before they saw only noise and an obstacle to a grade. They grow excited to read the poetry. The offer different readings and interpretations of the images. The venture out in class discussions. They catch the passion.
Love will always be the best motivation to learn. But it is a virtue that needs to be cultivated in students by teachers. When students come to love writing—not necessarily the difficulty of writing, but the wisdom that comes from it—they will be less likely to offload their editing, brainstorming, and drafting to a machine that will rob them of valuable critical exercises. And the same principle holds true for other subjects.
It is also a reality that some students will not catch the passion, no matter how much you explain the wonder of the subject or embody the love for it. They will choose not to love. They will choose to turn their face away in scorn from what is beautiful in creation and neglect their own God-given gifts. Your task as a teacher is to always put before them the invitation to come home, to see the grandeur of God’s world and to explore it earnestly with all of their strength and all of their mind. But they have to make that choice. You can’t force someone to love. And that is the challenge before us today. Those who choose not to love will have easier and easier means of faking their way through parts of life through AI (until they hit a wall). But what an impoverished way to live!
Teaching students to love their subjects means a return to human education, but not human-centered. Practicing the virtue of love means that we are reminded, in gratitude, of the Creator of these wonderful subjects of study and why they are worthy of our investigation. Virtues demand a telos, a direction towards which they and we are pointed. Even as students study math or physics or biology or poetry, they are studying the creation and glory that God has made for us to discover, and that is part of wisdom.
When students (and professors) come to understand that their task is to love what is lovely in pursuit of wisdom that God has made wonderful for us to discover for his glory, the allure of maximal efficiency loses its grip. It’s revealed as the hallow, soulless, foolish force that it is. The challenge before administrators and educators is less, “How can we catch AI cheaters?” but, How have we been subtly reinforcing maximal efficiency instead of the virtue of love? The solution to rampant AI cheating is not to surrender to technology and allow students to use AI to do their thinking for them, it’s to teach them to love wisdom.
For more on the virtue of Love, please check on my new book on the virtues, To Live Well!