In 55 B.C., Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote, “The main thing, however, which, to tell the truth, we very rarely do (for it involves considerable trouble and that most of us avoid), is to write as much as possible. The pen is the best and most effective artist and teacher of speech.” Did that famed Roman statesman have a premonition of Dartmouth’s present difficulties?
Two things can be true at once: 1) Artificial intelligence is a tool that those who want to stand out in the workforce will need to know how to use fluently, and 2) AI should not supplant one’s thinking. Professors across the College have been rolling out AI policies with differing degrees of strictness over the past few years, but these two principles tend to be at the core in some form.
The issues with recent developments are twofold: transparency and consistency. First, students are generally required to provide AI disclosures for wherever it has been used because AI is not your writing nor thinking, even if you prompted it with your ideas. Second, there should not be a two-tiered structure between what is expected of students and how our administration acts. Our academic leadership must lead by example and demonstrate to students that academia is not about optimizing for efficiency at the expense of all else but primarily about the search for truth. This endeavour is meant to be difficult; it is meant to force the student to toil in the company of the ghosts of Burke and Homer and reanimate them in their own way.
If we outsource our thinking and writing to a machine, we admit defeat in this search for truth. What message does it send to our students when it is our academic leadership that is the first to capitulate?
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
Luke Montalbano ’27 is an opinion editor and writer. He is from Vancouver, Canada and is majoring in Government and minoring in History. On campus, Luke is a Dickey Center War and Peace Fellow, the Co-President of the Federalist Society of Dartmouth, the President of the American Conservation Coalition of Dartmouth and President of the John Quincy Adams Society.
