{"id":195286,"date":"2025-12-20T19:06:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-20T19:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/195286\/"},"modified":"2025-12-20T19:06:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-20T19:06:13","slug":"dartmouth-professor-says-hes-surprised-just-how-scared-his-gen-z-students-are-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/195286\/","title":{"rendered":"Dartmouth professor says he’s surprised just how scared his Gen Z students are of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Scott Anthony (Dartmouth College, class of 1996) left a 20-year career in high-stakes consulting to join the faculty at his alma mater in July 2022, he thought he was leaving the \u201cintense day-to-day combat\u201d of the corporate world for a quieter life of teaching. Instead (as Anthony previously described in a commentary for Fortune<\/a>), he arrived on campus just months before the release of ChatGPT, landing him squarely in the center of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution that has left many of his students paralyzed by anxiety.<\/p>\n

In a recent interview, the former consultant at McKinsey<\/a> and Innosight, a boutique firm cofounded by Clayton Christensen and Mark Johnson in 2000 and acquired by Huron in 2017, revealed the prevailing mood among the next generation of business leaders isn\u2019t just excitement\u2014it is fear. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things that really surprises me consistently is how scared our students are of using it,\u201d Anthony said. He clarified this anxiety isn\u2019t merely about academic integrity or cheating. Plenty of his students are excited to use AI and push into the frontier of this new tech advance, he clarified, but a meaningful portion approach it with \u201chesitation and fear.\u201d They are \u201cscared full stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s something about AI where people, I think, worry that they\u2019ll lose their humanity if they lean too much into it,\u201d Anthony explained. This is different from many of his long-tenured academic colleagues, who he said are usually eager to dig into the new tools at their disposal. The freshly minted author of Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped our Modern World<\/a>, Anthony talked to Fortune about teaching a course on disruption while education and work itself is in the middle of being disrupted itself. \u201cHistory teaches me very clearly that in the middle of a change like this, it\u2019s very messy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fear of losing yourself<\/p>\n

Anthony said what he believes about studying disruption, and managing through it as a consultant, is that you look back later on and the pattern becomes clear, but at this particular stage, \u201cthere\u2019s just a lot of noise.\u201d He said he understands his students\u2019 concerns about AI and shares it to some extent\u2014offloading too much cognitive work to AI will atrophy the critical thinking skills required to lead.<\/p>\n

An eye-catching MIT study<\/a> published in June would seem to make Anthony\u2019s point. Titled \u201cyour brain on ChatGPT,\u201d with a subtitle mentioning \u201caccumulation of cognitive debt.\u201d Widely covered in the media as supporting Anthony\u2019s students\u2019 fear, that AI tools can somehow harm humanity, the study suggested that \u201ccognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use.\u201d In other words, it suggests that using AI makes you stupider.<\/p>\n

Vitomir Kovanovic<\/a> and Rebecca Marrone<\/a>, from the University of South Australia, argued in The Conversation<\/a> at the time that \u201cbrain-only group\u201d repeated the task in question three times, a phenomenon known as the\u00a0familiarisation effect<\/a>. The AI control group only got to \u201cuse their brains\u201d to perform the task once, they noted, and so achieved only slightly better engagement than the brain-only group\u2019s first try. They argued AI is functioning like a calculator, and tasks haven\u2019t become advanced enough to put students through the ringer, even using AI tools. Anthony, who didn\u2019t comment on that specific MIT study, told Fortune he\u2019s rolled up his sleeves on AI assessments.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been teaching a class about how you lead disruptive change,\u201d Anthony said, adding he wants to find someone who needs to learn a particular topic and use AI to tackle that. This doesn\u2019t mean he wants something like, say, an AI-driven song that required one prompt to make. \u201cI want you to actually go and expose the guts of the work that you did so I can then go and see whether you learned anything or not.\u201d Sometimes, he said, elegant outputs are the result from students who didn\u2019t learn anything, but he also gets \u201crough outputs where when you see what they\u2019re actually doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked about the example of someone like Jure Leskovec, the Stanford computer science professor who went fully to blue-book exams several years ago, as Fortune reported<\/a> in September, Anthony said he respected that, but it wasn\u2019t for him. \u201cI\u2019ve never given a blue-book exam,\u201d he said, noting he\u2019s just a few years removed from his consulting career and he may try it, but he\u2019s not there yet. Some of his colleagues are very strict still: Not only does one colleague still only do blue-book exams, \u201che does not allow people to go to the bathroom during the exam. You just, you can\u2019t leave the room.\u201d<\/p>\n

He agreed with Leskovec some changes are already irreversible: \u201cThe writing is all good now. The bad writing has been taken out.\u201d This can be \u201cdangerous,\u201d he added, saying he really pushes his students to resist temptation. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing I\u2019ve just really been pushing, whether it\u2019s students or whether it\u2019s the executives that I\u2019ve been working with, it\u2019s so seductive and easy to say, \u2018Let me offload,’\u201d he said. The reason why, he explained, has to do with what he learned about Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Child while researching his book.<\/p>\n

What Jerry Seinfeld believes about hard work<\/p>\n

To paraphrase Seinfeld, Anthony said he tells his students \u201cthe right way is the hard way.\u201d He recalled an interview Seinfeld gave to the Harvard Business Review<\/a> in 2017 when the famous comedian, with a reputation as a bit of a micromanager, was asked if he ever wanted McKinsey to help with his process. \u201cWho\u2019s McKinsey?\u201d He asked. When told that it was a consulting firm, he countered, \u201cAre they funny?\u201d<\/p>\n

Seinfeld was making the point, Alexander told Fortune, that the hard way to be funny is the right way, at least for him. He said he wants students to do the \u201chard work\u201d to develop the wisdom necessary to manage AI effectively. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe just have to separate people from technology when we\u2019re assessing learning or else we\u2019re going to get AI regurgitation,\u201d he warned. That can be useful for some things, \u201cbut if you\u2019re trying to figure out whether people learn something or not, it\u2019s useless.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthony also drew on a fitness analogy: \u201cYou go to the gym, you want to lift any amount of weight, bring a forklift with you. You can lift the weight, but that\u2019s not the point.\u201d <\/p>\n

Julia Child\u2018s long record of failure before success<\/p>\n

Anthony said his research, teaching at the Tuck School of Business, and his writing shows people are getting bogged down by AI when they should be focused on the hard work Seinfeld was referencing. Take the example of the famous cooking author Julia Child, which Anthony said was his favorite chapter of the book because it was the most surprising. The lesson he drew from it is that you may not be able to be the next Steve Jobs, but you could be the next Julia Child. \u201cIf life bounces the right way, I could imagine that happening to me, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n

The professor explained Child\u2019s example shows disruption \u201cisn\u2019t about being a superhero,\u201d but it\u2019s more about ordinary people following certain behaviors and showing curiosity. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a reminder that there is no straight line to success,\u201d he said. She started working on her masterpiece, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, roughly 10 years\u2014and two publisher changes\u2014before succeeding with it. She also failed her first exam at Paris\u2019 Cordon Bleu<\/a>, persevering to become the woman who brought French cuisine to mainstream America. \u201cIt\u2019s classic hero journey sort of stuff,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Consider the first French meal that Child cooked for her husband, Anthony said: brain, simmered in red wine. \u201cEverybody agreed it was a disaster.\u201d But again, he said, the hard work was the point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Scott Anthony (Dartmouth College, class of 1996) left a 20-year career in high-stakes consulting to join the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,4195,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-195286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-colleges-and-universities","12":"tag-il","13":"tag-israel","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}