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I just read a student essay and I am pretty sure that it is AI generated, but I don’t have proof. I know that AI detection software does not work, but I feel like I cannot let students get away with stuff like this!

I have noticed that using AI is a slippery slope – both for myself and for my students. What might start out as asking for feedback on a text that you fully intend to implement yourself after examining it critically and only addressing points that you agree with, quickly turns into AI drafting texts, which then might be more or less thoughtfully edited. How can I avoid getting lazy using these tools and losing skills to AI? And how can I help my students with this?

For some reason, this semester a lot of students responded to free-text questions on my course evaluations (usually nobody replies). While I am grateful on the one hand because there is of course a lot of very useful information in there that I will be able to learn a lot from, I am also overwhelmed and cannot possibly spend hours to analyse all of it. Can I upload it to AI and ask for a summary?

I have implemented an exercise in my course where students generate AI responses to a question and then critique it, with the goal of showing them that they cannot trust AI outputs. But when I gave that task two weeks ago, two students refused to do it, quoting environmental concerns. I myself am also worried about the environmental impact of AI, too, but that is just my gut feeling and not based on any data. Can you help?

The argument that “AI is here to stay” and therefore we have to use it is not a valid one. The future is always undetermined and we do have influence on how it turns out. And that includes whether AI is staying -- or not. So what if the critical AI skill of our era, as Karen Costa puts it, was not how to use it, but how to resist it? There are five main reasons for AI resistance, according to Şimşek and Yasar (2025): Socio-economic concerns, like AI taking people’s jobs, Ethical issues, since AI systems are opaque and biased, Safety risks, when AI gets to make decisions, Threats to democracy and sovereignty, “including the use of AI for large-scale societal manipulation“, and Environmental impact. All of these are serious and worth exploring in detail. So if we wanted to resist AI, for these reasons or others, fully or just inducing enough friction in the adoption to make sure we don’t move faster than we have the chance to safely assess what we are doing, how would we do that? Drimmer & Nygren (2025) suggest four small acts of friction: Centering students in our teaching. Not AI, not preventing cheat with AI, just students. They write that “[d]efensive maneuvers, like in-class essay writing exclusively, are acts of deprivation. They deprive students of the opportunity to reflect and refine away from the pressures of the classroom clock.” Instead, we should keep writing assignments and not police how they were generated, but rather make them thought-provoking and give thoughtful feedback on the thoughts reported in them. Not optimizing everything. Making space for things that are not on the curriculum and that are not credited: “Reading groups, lightning round presentations, unambitious programs of being in simple, un-CV-able conversations” to focus back on humanity and community, and make space for skepticism. Taking some things offline again: Sharing printouts, using leaflets, not making everything be online all the time (but careful that we do not roll back all efforts on inclusion that have been made thanks to assistive technologies!). Ask questions — in person, in established relationships — about what problem we are really trying to fix by adopting AI, and whether we are really working on the right problem. What do you think? Is resisting AI the real AI skill of the era? If you are resisting or introducing friction, how are you doing it? --- Read more: Drimmer & Nygren (2025). Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education. https://www.publicbooks.org/four-frictions-or-how-to-resist-ai-in-education/ Şimşek and Yasar (2025). From Rejection to Regulation: Mapping the Landscape of AI Resistance. Available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5287068 --- An earlier version of this post was first published by Mirjam Glessmer on https://mirjamglessmer.com/2026/03/11/thinking-about-ai-resistance/ and is reposted here with permission as an example for possible content on this blog.

My student submitted a text and I am 99% sure that it is written by AI. It uses all those words that are all over AI-generated texts, like “thus”, and “leverage”, and I just feel it in my gut. So I uploaded the student’s text to ChatGPT and asked “did you write this?” and it confirmed that it had written it. I even uploaded it to one of those AI checkers, and it gave me a score of 83% AI generated. I confronted the student, but they deny having used ChatGPT or any other AI at all. What can I do? I don’t want to escalate this if I am not 100% sure.

A master student wants to use AI to generate an image in their thesis. The publisher of the original image does not respond to attempts to contact them, and the student really wants to use this image and says they need it. The image is a photograph of some structure they are discussing in the thesis through a microscope. I do not think generating and using an AI image is right thing to do. What should I do?