A CNN article says some students at Yale now can't even talk in class without using ChatGPT to coach them

[highplainsdem]

This article

AI is changing the way students talk in class and how teachers test them
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/04/health/ai-impact-college-student-thinking-wellness

was written by a student who's a junior at Yale and interviewed other students.

From one senior she talked to:

Amanda said she was taken aback. Until that day, she didn’t realize that her peers were using chatbots in class and sharing what it spits out in the classroom. Now she notices the impact that tendency is having on class discussions.

“Everyone now kind of sounds the same,” she said. “I feel like during my freshman year in college, I would sit in seminars where everyone had something different to contribute. Although people would piggyback off each other, they approached from different angles and offered different commentary.”

From another senior:

Jessica, a senior at Yale, told CNN that she uses AI every day for her classes. In an economics seminar in which the professor cold-calls students, “at the beginning of class, you could see every single person putting every single PDF” into a chatbot.

She also uses AI when she has trouble turning her thoughts into words. “I want to comment, and I have this concept, but I don’t know how to formulate the sentence myself,” she said. So she asked a chatbot “to make it sound more cohesive.”

She also admitted she's lazier now, using a chatbot. Her work ethic has dimished since high school.

Another Yale student, a junior, says students are using AI to give them scripts of what to say in class because they feel insecure.

The article also quotes a humanities professor who's a fellow with the rightwing American Enterprise Institute who likes the way students using AI has "raised the floor of class discussion to a generally better level" but worries about how it precludes "original thoughts." He's a nitwit, if he's giving his students approving responses when they echo ChatGPT but still wants original thoughts.

Another professor who's quoted said he's heard of people using AI to decide which candidate to vote for, which he finds scary.

These students have had ChatGPT and similar chatbots available for only three years and four months.

The effect on them has not been good.