Carl, your essay is excellent, but I think it overlooks the current reality of why many young people — and many adults — are attending high school, university, or online degree programs in the first place.

In the 1990s, a humanities graduate, and even more so a STEM graduate, could still reasonably expect that a degree would open the door to a stable job, a salary, benefits, and some form of adult security. Today, that social contract has already collapsed for millions of people. Many students are not pursuing knowledge for its own sake, or even a meaningful intellectual formation. They are trying to survive. They are trying to obtain the piece of paper that might keep them from being permanently locked out of the labour market.

I’ll be turning 49 in a few days. For the past year I’ve been enrolled in an education program at a private online university. What I receive are videos, PDF study guides, and video-call classes where teachers lecture to students whose cameras and microphones are turned off. All our assessments are multiple-choice. There is no forum where students can meet each other, build networks, discuss ideas, or experience anything resembling an intellectual community.

This format forces us to study and go deeper on our own, while also working, looking for work, or trying to remain economically afloat.

It is very sad to study this way: alone, disconnected, unseen. But this is how millions of people around the world are now “studying.” Not in libraries, not in seminars, not in communities of inquiry, but in isolation, in front of screens, trying to earn a credential that may or may not help them get a job.

In that context, ChatGPT and Claude have become, for many of us, the only available interlocutors. Not because we are intellectually lazy, but because no one else is there. No classmate responds. No teacher offers serious feedback. No institution creates a space for discussion. No human being seems to care what we are thinking or trying to understand.

That matters.

When I began studying, I was genuinely excited. I took notes by hand. I wrote to the school principal asking whether they could create a forum where students could exchange ideas. I received no reply. A few days later, I found myself discussing behaviorism with ChatGPT. I wrote on Substack about what I was learning, hoping for feedback from teachers, students, or people interested in education. I got nothing. Just silence. So I kept writing down my thoughts and ideas, sometimes with the help of an AI assistant, sometimes on my own. At no point did I receive meaningful help, advice, or feedback from the institution around me. Over time, I found myself increasingly alone with my online studies while also looking for work to stay afloat.

This is why I think the AI question cannot be separated from the institutional and economic conditions in which students are now learning. Yes, AI can become cognitive surrender. Yes, it can allow students to bypass the difficult work that produces durable learning. But in many contemporary educational settings, the student has already been abandoned before the chatbot appears.

Whether they are private online schools or official in-person schools, whether they are for teenagers or adults., the school has already withdrawn the human encounter, or has done so superficially. The teacher has already become a video, or an authority figure who's so “burned out” that it's best not to bother him. The classroom has already become a PDF, or a situation where it’s best not to participate so as not to make others uncomfortable or disrupt the rhythm of the class. The cohort has already disappeared. The assessment has already been reduced to a multiple-choice form. The degree has already become transactional because the labour market made it transactional first.

So when students turn to AI, they are not always choosing a shortcut over a rich intellectual formation. Not by choice, but out of necessity. A diploma is just a formality. What matters is putting food on the table, and a diploma no longer guarantees anything. That's why more often than not, we are reaching for the only responsive presence in an otherwise empty educational environment. That does not solve the problem you describe. But it changes the moral picture.

You and your colleagues mentioned here are teachers with established careers from a time before this digital economy. You have stable incomes, homes, families, cars, and all the comforts that allow you to criticize today’s intellectual poverty. Are you going to sit here and debate with me how to organize book clubs in a poor Third World city where children are selling food on the street to help support their families? I highly doubt that you or any of your colleagues would want to sit down and talk with me, a 49-year-old college student studying education.

So, the question is not only: “Are students using AI to avoid thinking?” The question is also: “What kind of economy and educational system has made a robot feel more viable, attentive, more dialogic, and more intellectually available than the institution charging students for a degree?” If we want students to think first and use ChatGPT later, then someone has to care about their thinking before ChatGPT enters the room.