Opinion columns reflect the views of their authors, not of MU Student News.
Two things happened to me last month that I have been unable to reconcile, so I am writing a column instead.
First: stuck on a mathematics concept at 11 p.m., I asked an AI tool to explain it. It explained it five ways, patiently, until one clicked. It was, without exaggeration, the best tutoring I have received at that hour, competing admittedly against nobody.
Second: a classmate — who will remain several classmates — pasted the entire homework into the same tool, submitted the output, and spent the evening gaming. Same tool. Same night. One of us learned something.
The honest position is that both stories are true and neither cancels the other. The tool is a superb explainer and a superb evader, and which one it becomes is decided entirely by the question you type. “Explain why this works” and “do this for me” are three words apart and a whole education apart.
What worries me is not cheating in the exam-hall sense. Exams still exist; the reckoning arrives on schedule. What worries me is quieter: homework is where understanding gets built, slowly and unglamorously, and outsourcing it doesn’t transfer the grade — it transfers the struggle, and the struggle was the product. You can borrow answers. You cannot borrow having understood.
I don’t want a ban, which would be both unenforceable and dishonest — these tools will be sitting on our desks for the rest of our working lives. I want us to get precise. Use it like a tutor: ask why, demand explanations, argue with it. Refuse it as a ghostwriter. And when a teacher asks how you got an answer, the test is simple: if the honest reply is “I don’t know, but it’s correct,” something has already gone wrong — whether or not anyone catches it.
A disclosure, since this column demands them: portions of my own study routine now include exactly the tutoring use I describe, and my teachers know it. That conversation — telling a teacher how you actually work — turned out to be the least awkward part of all of this. I recommend it, not least because it converts a private grey area into a stated understanding, which is where honest work prefers to live.
