{"id":63439,"date":"2025-08-06T20:39:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T20:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/63439\/"},"modified":"2025-08-06T20:39:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T20:39:10","slug":"will-ai-usher-in-the-end-of-deep-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/63439\/","title":{"rendered":"Will AI Usher In the End of Deep Thinking?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Cal Newport about how college students are using AI.<\/p>\n

Derek Thompson: I want to start with observations before we move into analysis. In your reporting, in your experience, have you seen major changes in the behavior of students in the age of AI?<\/p>\n

Cal Newport: It\u2019s shifting rapidly. In my own case, for example, last year, I did a story for The New Yorker<\/a> about how students are using AI in the context of writing. And the premise of the story was I looked over the shoulder, virtually speaking, of a couple students to actually watch how they\u2019re interacting with AI. And what I found in that story, the thesis of that story, is that a lot of what students were doing when they were writing with AI, they were not outsourcing writing to the AI. They weren\u2019t saving time, either. So it wasn\u2019t an efficiency play. My argument was they were having these almost parasocial back-and-forth interactions that were aimed at reducing the peak cognitive strain of the process of writing a paper. So it was this interesting interactive back-and-forth they would have: \u201cWell, what about this? What do you think about that? OK, I\u2019m going to write this. What do you think about it?\u201d<\/p>\n

My thesis was it was trying to make the peak difficulty of writing better. When you look today, so let\u2019s fast-forward a year later, there\u2019s been multiple things that have reported on this more recently, and it seems like this parasocial relationship, this \u201cI\u2019m in this interaction with you to take difficulty, smooth over hard peaks,\u201d has really maybe metastasized. So there\u2019s a big new article out recently from The Guardian<\/a> where a reporter convinced, I think it was three students, to basically let him have full access to their ChatGPT Plus accounts so that he could see every single thing that they were saying over a period of whatever it was, a couple of weeks. There\u2019s a huge transcript. And he says their interaction with it was constant. It was just all day long. Not just about homework assignments, not just about a paper they were writing. It is \u201cWhat does it mean to be a human being?\u201d \u201cWhat do you think it means that this girl said this to me when we were walking by in the cafeteria?\u201d That it had become a sort of interactive, back-and-forth partner.<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s this interesting thing I think happening among young people with these tools where it\u2019s expanding beyond its role in, pragmatically speaking, \u201cThis is helping me do certain work,\u201d which we can get into because it is. And I think it\u2019s making a big difference in how college actually operates. But it is immediately seeming to move over into the space where social media and other tools were as well in this diversion, distraction, tickle-your-brain type of context. It\u2019s interesting. It gives you a release in the moment. It prevents you from being bored. It prevents you from having to feel some negative strain. So it really expanded its footprint, it looks like. It\u2019s starting to expand its footprint in students\u2019 life more than I thought it would. So a lot of things are going on here.<\/p>\n

Thompson: One thing I hear you saying is that while a lot of people think about AI as an economic technology, you are watching the way that it\u2019s already become a social technology. You talked about the parasocial relationship that people have with the large language models they\u2019re interacting with. They\u2019re talking to it like it\u2019s a professor, like it\u2019s a friend, like it\u2019s a research assistant. That\u2019s how I use, say, deep research. Let\u2019s ground this at the level of college. How has this changed the way students and professors operate?<\/p>\n

Newport: If we look at it just from a functional perspective, it\u2019s changed a lot of things. I teach mainly math-type courses or theory-type courses. During the pandemic, obviously, you had to administer these exams remotely because there was no one in person at all. There was a brief window after the pandemic where it was thought, \u201cOh, this is convenient. Why not keep doing it this way?\u201d Right? During exam period, this way we don\u2019t all have to stick around for five days instead of going home to take the exams. Let\u2019s keep doing this online. I was doing it synchronously online, essentially.<\/p>\n

Post-ChatGPT, you can\u2019t do that, not for an introductory, discrete mathematics course, because every single problem on that exam can probably be answered for you by ChatGPT. Because not only is it not that it\u2019s not very complicated math, but as I learned when I\u2019ve experimented with using ChatGPT to help write problem set problems, for a lot of these problems, it turns out there\u2019s only so many good examples that are out there. There\u2019s only so many actual ways to test a sophomore-level undergraduate on doing strong induction proofs or something like this. There\u2019s really four good examples, and you can obfuscate them, but that\u2019s that. So you could put almost every problem into ChatGPT, right? So, OK, we can\u2019t do remote exams anymore.<\/p>\n

I think the same thing is happening, I picked this up in my reporting. Whenever you have lower-stakes writing, there used to be a big thing where you would say, \u201cCome on, have a response essay at the beginning of each class.\u201d This way, I\u2019m not going to look at it too carefully, but you have to do the reading because you had to write 500 words, your thoughts or whatever. As one of the students told me in my reporting, \u201cOh, those types of essays are eminently ChatGPT-able.\u201d That was the phrase, because exactly that type of writing is very ChatGPT-able.<\/p>\n

When it comes to large papers, what seems to be happening is we thought when this technology first came out, we being professors, that maybe students would be able to essentially recursively generate the entire paper from scratch. You can\u2019t ask ChatGPT, \u201cGive me 10,000 words on, you know, Jung and the collective unconscious.\u201d But what you can do is say, \u201cGive me an outline for an essay like that.\u201d \u201cOK, let\u2019s look at Section 2 of this outline. Break that down into the three subsections.\u201d \u201cOK, let\u2019s look at this subsection here. Can you give me some drafts of texts?\u201d So there was some fear that doing that, you could basically have a whole essay produced. It would be like a custom version of those cheating websites that were around when we were growing up, where you could pay for papers on the internet. That\u2019s not working too well. Those papers aren\u2019t coherent, and the tone isn\u2019t that great.<\/p>\n

So on long papers, it\u2019s more that students are using it for ideas. They\u2019re using it for \u201cGive me a structure for this argument.\u201d It\u2019s less about the craft of creating the actual words than it seems to be the craft of actually critically thinking about what I want to say. So that is creating changes, I think, for the humanities. There\u2019s been a move toward a lot more in-class assessment. If it\u2019s a quantitative class, there\u2019s a move toward, probably what we need to do is have a quiz in the first part of class once a month and weigh that more than we\u2019re going to weigh problem sets. There\u2019s more of a move for intro mathematics classes that the problem sets are basically for practice. You should do these problems. That\u2019s how you\u2019re going to practice, but it\u2019s going to be less of a graded assessment. That temptation is too hard, that you could basically solve any one of these problems.<\/p>\n

So there is definitely a big shift that we have to deal with. I think the consumer internet caused a comparable size shift in higher academia. That introduced a huge amount of changes. I mean, I was a student and grad student just as that got really big. That introduced a lot of changes we had to adapt to. These are similar, what\u2019s happening, but they\u2019re numerous as well.<\/p>\n

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.<\/p>\n

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Calvin Newport
Producer: Devon Baroldi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Cal Newport about how college students are using AI. Derek Thompson:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-63439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}