By
BBU Team (Oana Negru-Subtirica, Bogdan Glavan, Bianca Marinica)
🇷🇴 Versiunea în limba română: citește aici
Our experiences throughout the project have consistently shown that AI has inevitably become a part of our students’ lives, sometimes perhaps even a part of their everyday reality. While students use AI extensively in both their academic and personal lives, reflections on the ethical implications seem uncommon.
Cognitive Offloading: Externalizing thinking to AI
When explicitly asked about concerns, students did mention worries about how overreliance on AI can have a detrimental effect on critical thinking. As also mentioned in the podcast episode Using AI: How can it impact students’ lives, recent research has started to confirm these concerns. For instance, Gerlich (2025) suggests that higher AI use is linked to a greater probability of cognitive offloading, which involves externalizing cognitive effort to the AI, potentially hindering critical thinking.
From a psychological perspective, externalizing thinking and academic tasks to an AI can be understood as a way of coping with academic challenges. For instance, when faced with a heavy workload and complex assignments, some students may experience strong negative emotions such as overwhelm, anxiety, or frustration. Relying on AI to complete those tasks can reduce their emotional distress by solving the assignments faster and with less effort. However, it is possible that reducing cognitive effort simultaneously reduces the learning gains.
Beyond Individual Choice: Systemic Contributors
Even students who are aware of this potential downside continue to rely on AI for academic work. Why would someone persist in a behavior they know may be detrimental in the long term? To explore this, we must look beyond individual aspects and look at the systemic factors that might be prompting students to use AI. While a heavy workload contributes to this, the risk of unfair competition in the absence of clear guidelines also plays a role. When some students use AI to produce faster work that matches the teachers’ expectations, helping them manage the workload, it can create an uneven playing field. This may increase the pressure to use AI even among students who are reluctant to do so, touching on the ethical principles of Human Agency and Oversight, and Diversity, Non-Discrimination, and Fairness.
What Can Be Done?
One possible direction is to offer students access to resources and services that support them in developing practical strategies to navigate academic demands and manage their emotions during the transition to university life. This could also include raising awareness that, while overreliance on AI can reduce negative emotions in the short term, it could have self-sabotaging effects in the long term, both in terms of academic skills and emotional regulation.
Another possible direction could be for teachers to discuss and set ground rules regarding AI use in the classroom, keeping in mind the ways in which unregulated use can lead to unfair advantages. To support this process, educators can explore our Open Educational Resources (OERs), particularly:
- OER 1: Empathetic Contract Creations, which includes a practical activity on developing collective rules regarding AI use in the classroom
- OER: Storyboarding, which includes a comic exploring fairness regarding AI use in the classroom
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