The Arms Race Has Freshmen in It

Jeff Sharlet teaches writing at Dartmouth, and this month he did the simplest, most honest thing a teacher can do with a question they're afraid to know the answer to: he asked his students, anonymously, and then he wrote down what they said. The popular story about young people and artificial intelligence is a story of native fluency — they grew up with it, they get it, they're racing ahead while the rest of us fret. Sharlet's survey, which he laid out in a long and sobering thread, returns from the actual classroom with something closer to the opposite. "I wish I could tell you the responses thrummed with defiance," he wrote. "Instead, some read like substance abuse testimonies." That is a writing professor reaching, involuntarily, for the language of addiction to describe how his students talk about a homework tool. He did not pick that frame to be provocative. It is what the answers sounded like.

Read what the students actually report and the framing stops being a metaphor. "Many say they hate it, don't want to use it," Sharlet wrote, "but they feel like now it's submit or fail." They feel like "there's no escaping it. And they don't like it." Sit with the structure of that sentence, because it is the exact shape of every dependency this publication has ever documented. Not desire — compulsion under threat. Not "I love this tool" but "I can't afford to be the one who refused it." The thing they describe is an arms race: the moment some classmates use AI to move faster, opting out stops being a principled stand and becomes a decision to lose. So they use it. Then they resent the classmate who used it first, and wonder whether anyone's work in the room is really their own anymore. The despair Sharlet found isn't about the technology being bad at its job. It's about being trapped in a game whose rules nobody in the room agreed to and nobody in the room can leave.

“"Submit or fail" is what a tether sounds like from the inside. We didn't have to teach these students the word — they reached for the language of addiction on their own, to describe a homework tool. The kids aren't behind on this. They're ahead of the story being told about them.”

And the trap was built one floor up from where the students are standing. Sharlet points out the contradiction his own institution hands its undergraduates: a college that promotes AI and tells you not to cheat while making it "really, really easy to cheat," as several of his students put it — the moral confusion engineered directly into the syllabus. He goes further, and names the deal underneath. Dartmouth's president, he notes, cut an arrangement with Anthropic — a company Sharlet flatly accuses of having "stole the books of 133 faculty" — without consulting the educators whose work was used. Hold those two facts against each other, because together they are the whole machine. The institution monetizes the model at the top and mandates the students use it at the bottom, and the despair in the middle isn't a malfunction. It's the design working. The kids didn't sign up to be tethered to this. They were enrolled in it, by people who were paid to enroll them.

Sharlet's classroom is one professor's survey, and it would be easy to wave off as anecdote if the numbers from everywhere else weren't pointing the same direction. A survey of 95,513 students across twenty major U.S. universities found a third of them now use chatbots to produce text, code, or video for assignments. New Student Voice data this month found two in five students explicitly worried about their own dependence on AI tools — not worried about the tech in the abstract, worried about themselves. NBC News, talking to students across the country, found peers cutting corners with AI sometimes at the direct encouragement of faculty, and anti-AI student groups forming on at least five campuses to argue for slowing a thing they were told they had no choice but to accelerate into. The defiance Sharlet hoped to find exists — it's just organizing in the hallway, because it lost the argument in the classroom. The pattern is consistent and it is not the pattern we were sold. The generation supposedly racing happily ahead is, in large numbers, describing dependence and asking, out loud, for someone to slow it down.

This is why the survey lands here and not just in the education section. Strip the campus details away and what Sharlet recorded is the founding observation of this entire site, captured live in eighteen-year-olds: a tool offered as help becomes load-bearing, the leaning becomes mandatory, and the cord that felt like an advantage reveals itself, once you try to set it down, as the thing you can't. "Submit or fail" is what a tether sounds like from the inside. We did not need to invent a word for what's happening to these students. They reached for the same one we did — the language of substance, of can't-stop, of an escalation they narrate like people testifying about a habit — and they did it without ever reading a line of this publication. That's the part that should stop you. The kids aren't behind on this. They're ahead of the story being told about them, and the story they're telling, in the vocabulary they chose for themselves, is ours.

One professor, an anonymous survey, and answers that read "like substance abuse testimonies." A third of students at twenty universities already running on it. Two in five afraid of their own dependence. A college that sells the model upstairs and grades the students on it downstairs, and calls the despair in between an education. Nobody in that classroom chose the arms race. They were enrolled in it. That's what tethered means — and this time, the people saying so are the ones we were told loved it most.