Dr. Anastasia Berg, a philosophy lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, warns that more than half of the students in her “Contemporary Moral Problems” class used AI to write their final exams—despite it being explicitly forbidden.
She argues that this is not just academic dishonesty but a sign of a “subcognitive turn,” where students are gradually losing the ability to think and express themselves independently.
Berg contends that language is the foundation of thought; humans cannot think without the ability to use language proficiently. The process of learning to read, comprehend, and write is the very process of forming cognitive ability.
But when students let AI “do the work” for seemingly minor tasks like summarizing documents, outlining, or analyzing passages, they lose this core training opportunity.
She writes: “The ability to identify what is being argued and how it is being argued cannot be replaced. No part of cognitive understanding is trivial.”
Using AI for tasks like summarization makes students dependent on formulaic analysis, causing them to lose the ability to distinguish details, comprehend complex texts, or evaluate the merit of an argument.
In the long run, this leads to a “post-cognitive” society, where people are no longer able to read the news, understand medical documents, or participate responsibly in a democracy.
She opposes the view of historian D. Graham Burnett (Princeton), who suggests that “literacy” is merely a historical phase and is unnecessary in the age of AI. Berg sees this as a dangerous compromise, turning higher education into “kindergartenization”—where students only sing, copy, and paste letters on a wall instead of reading and writing.
According to her, there are still many students who want to and can read, think, and write independently—what they need is a technology-free environment and instructors with the will to maintain true academic discipline.
“The university exists to create cognitively mature adults. That can only be achieved if we help students learn to read, think, and write on their own,” she concludes.
📌 Using AI in learning not only threatens academic integrity but also undermines the foundation of human cognition. When students let AI summarize instead of reading to understand, they lose linguistic thinking ability—the root of knowledge and freedom. The solution, according to Dr. Berg, is to return to a “tech-free” learning space, where people still practice reading, thinking, and writing as genuine intellectual acts.
