AI is harmful for learning which is why I’m banning it in my classes

I put up my course web site for History of 20th Century American Popular Music, which includes an assignment due the first day of class: read about Stephen Foster and “Old Folks at Home”, listen to recordings of the song by Al Jolson and Ray Charles, and write a one paragraph response. Within 24 hours of emailing the students that the site was live, one of them had already submitted their assignment. I was excited by the quick turnaround until I read it. The kid had obviously put the discussion question into ChatGPT and copied and pasted its output. Just to be thorough, I ran the submission through Pangram, and it said 92% AI generated, 8% AI assisted, but I could have told you that just from inspection. I have been putting a lot of effort into designing assignments that the kids won’t want to use AI to avoid doing, so this was extremely disappointing. Let’s be fair to this student: I hadn’t yet announced my AI policy. It’s in the syllabus, but I know no one reads the syllabus. The…