Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • What My Online Students Think of Online Education

    What My Online Students Think of Online Education

    In my Canvas discussions, I asked my online students to compare digital learning with face-to-face classes, focusing on engagement. Their responses revealed a consistent theme: engagement is welcome only when it feels meaningful. They don’t mind interacting if the instructor gives them authentic, purposeful tasks—not the mechanical grind of busywork disguised as “participation.” 

    Several admitted that the steady stream of Canvas notifications feels like digital nagging, while others said they’ve grown fluent in navigating the platform. 

    Many praised the control and solitude of online courses, saying they prefer working alone to enduring the awkward silences, small talk, and clock-watching of in-person classes.

    A number of students described their lives as an intricate juggling act—full-time jobs, parenting, long commutes—and called online education “a lifeline.” Without it, they said, college simply wouldn’t be possible. 

    What I took from these exchanges is that my students crave efficiency and purpose. They want online courses that are streamlined, clearly organized, and free from filler. They appreciate the focus that comes with studying privately, without the distractions and logistics of campus life.

    While pass rates in online courses can be up to fifteen percent lower than in-person ones, that statistic misses the larger truth: online education isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity. For many working adults and parents, it’s not just another mode of learning; it’s the only door still open.

  • My Doppelganger in Dark Sweats

    My Doppelganger in Dark Sweats

    Last night I dreamed that a baby had been abandoned in the flower garden outside my San Francisco apartment. His thin wail rose above the city hum, but no one seemed to hear it but me. The world went on—cars passing, neighbors coming and going—while I alone stood transfixed by that cry. I lifted the baby from the dirt, his skin warm and impossibly soft, and held him against my chest. Standing at the threshold of the apartment I rented with my wife and our stray orange cat, I prayed for holiness and wept, as though the infant had been dropped from heaven for me alone to fail or redeem.

    Inside, the apartment felt like an expensive tomb—luxurious, dim, deliberately shadowed, as if light itself were rationed. I fed the child and watched him feed, marveled at the smallness of his breaths. When his parents arrived, both scientists, I confronted them. They were calm, rational, and convinced me of their legitimacy with clinical precision. Their excuse was airtight, their affect detached, and in the end, I surrendered the baby, though my faith in their explanation felt paper-thin.

    Then the parents and the baby were gone. At this point, my role inside the apartment was clear: My wife and I were educators using the apartment to host seminars on DNA and algorithms for college students. The air smelled faintly of coffee and ozone. During one of these sessions, the true apartment owner appeared: my thirty-year-old doppelgänger, tall, lean, dressed in the sleek anonymity of wealth—dark designer sweats, minimalist sneakers. He admired the apartment I had borrowed as though validating his own taste: the kitchen gadgets gleamed like relics, the food neatly arranged, the DVDs alphabetized. His presence was eerie—a reflection of my own mind rendered in a sharper resolution. We talked about the future buyer of the apartment, another iteration of us—older, familiar, running on the same mysterious algorithm encoded in our shared DNA.

    When the lecture ended, my wife and I returned the keys to my younger self and walked hand in hand along the apartment’s tennis courts. The sky had the bruised hue of evening. I told her that everything—the baby, the double, the science lectures—had overwhelmed me. I broke down, crying again for the purity I had felt when I prayed over the abandoned child. That moment at the doorstep remained the still point of the dream: holiness in the act of holding something utterly helpless, something untouched by algorithm or ownership.

  • Will Online Education Expose the Class Divide?

    Will Online Education Expose the Class Divide?

    I began teaching online composition in March 2020, when the world suddenly went remote. Like everyone else, I adapted out of necessity, not preference. Since then, I’ve taught both online and face-to-face courses, and the contrast has been eye-opening. I never realized how physically demanding in-person teaching was until I experienced the frictionless ease of the online classroom. Behind the Canvas wall, I am a disembodied voice, orchestrating discussion like the Wizard of Oz. In person, I am on stage—reacting, performing, fielding energy and questions in real time. It is exhilarating and exhausting, proof that teaching in the flesh demands more than intellect; it requires stamina.

    Today, I discussed this with a friend and colleague nearing seventy, a man who has been teaching full-time for nearly forty years. Despite the fatigue of in-person instruction, he refuses to teach online. His reasoning is both moral and practical. He doesn’t like the lower pass and retention rates of online classes, but his deeper concern is social. “The more we move online,” he told me, “the worse the class divide gets. Only rich students will take face-to-face classes and get a real education. Poor students—working long hours and pinching gas money—will settle for online. Don’t you see, McMahon? It’s an equity issue.”

    He had a point. “So what you’re saying,” I replied, “is that the wealthy can afford genuine engagement—real classrooms, real conversation—while online education offers a simulation of that experience for everyone else.” I paused, thinking about my own students. “But it’s not just an equity issue,” I added. “It’s an engagement issue. We talk endlessly about ‘student engagement’ in online learning, but that word is often misplaced. Many students choose online classes precisely to disengage. They’re working parents, caretakers, exhausted employees. They don’t want a full immersion—they want survival. They want the credential, not the communion.”

    Later that morning, I brought this conversation to my freshman composition class. When I asked if they wanted “student engagement” in their online courses, they laughed. “Hell no,” one said. “It’s like traffic school—you just get through it.” Another, a bright fire science major, confessed that after eight weeks of an online class, she’d learned “absolutely nothing.” Their expectations were low, and they knew it. Online education, for them, was not a journey of discovery but an obstacle course—something endured, not experienced. Still, as someone who teaches writing online, I can’t accept that entirely. I want my courses to be navigable and meaningful—to raise enduring questions that linger beyond the semester. Like Dorothy on the yellow brick road, I want students to follow a clear path, one step at a time, until they reach their own version of Oz. And while I know online learning will never replicate the immediacy of face-to-face teaching, I don’t think it should. Each has its own logic, its own measure of success. Forcing one to imitate the other would only flatten them both.

  • Flexing My Wrist Presence Against the Dying of the Light

    Flexing My Wrist Presence Against the Dying of the Light

    In my early forties, I was drunk on “wrist presence.” I wanted watches so large they could double as signal mirrors for rescue helicopters. The bigger the case, the smaller my self-esteem. These oversized monstrosities weren’t badges of taste; they were distress flares of insecurity and a middle-aged identity crisis. Even as my horological palate matured, the vanity remained. I wasn’t trying to tell time—I was trying to tell the world I mattered.

    Yet my vanity was oddly selective. I didn’t care if my car was plain as Melba toast or if my wardrobe screamed “laundry day.” All I wanted was a clean Honda Accord, a passable body, a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a watch that did the heavy lifting of my entire identity. For two decades, that formula felt like equilibrium—a minimalist shell hiding a maximalist ego.

    Then, late in my sixty-third year, the vibe shifted. The thrill curdled. My so-called “signature watch” no longer filled me with adrenaline and dopamine. 

    I still love my divers, but wearing them now feels less like conquest and more like quiet companionship. The fire has cooled. No amount of flexing on Instagram or brooding on YouTube can resurrect that manic gleam. The truth is brutally simple: every tick of the watch is a memento mori. I’ve aged out of the performance. Time, the final minimalist, has stripped me down and humbled me in the face of my mortality. 

  • AI—Superpower for Learning or NPC Machine?

    AI—Superpower for Learning or NPC Machine?

    Essay Assignment:

    Background

    Students describe AI as a superpower for speed and convenience that leaves them with glossy, identical prose—clean, correct, and strangely vacant. Many say it “talks a lot without saying much,” flattens tone into AI-speak, and numbs them with sameness. The more they rely on it, the less they think; laziness becomes a habit, creativity atrophies, and personal voice is lost and replaced by AI-speak. Summaries replace books, notes replace listening, and polished drafts replace real inquiry. The result feels dehumanizing: work that reads like it was written by everyone and no one.

    Students also report a degradation in their education. Higher learning has become boring. Speed, making deadlines, and convenience are its key features, and the AI arms race pushes reluctant students to use AI just to keep pace. 

    The temptation to use AI because all the other students are using it rises with fatigue—copy-paste now, promise depth later—and “later” never arrives. Some call this “cognitive debt”: quick wins today, poorer thinking tomorrow. 

    Some students confess that using AI makes them feel like Non Player Characters in a video game. They’re not growing in their education. They have succumbed to apathy and cynicism as far as their education is concerned. 

    Other students admit that AI has stolen their attention and afflicted them with cognitive debt. Cognitive debt is the mental deficit we accumulate when we let technology do too much of our thinking for us. Like financial debt, it begins as a convenience—offloading memory, calculation, navigation, or decision-making to apps and algorithms—but over time it exacts interest in the form of diminished focus, weakened recall, and blunted problem-solving. Cognitive debt describes the gradual outsourcing of core mental functions—attention, critical reasoning, and creativity—to digital systems that promise efficiency but erode self-reliance. The result is a paradox: as our tools grow “smarter,” we grow more dependent on them to compensate for the very skills they dull. In short, cognitive debt is the quiet cost of convenience: each time we let technology think for us, we lose a little of our capacity to think for ourselves. 

    Yet the picture isn’t purely bleak. Several students say AI can be a lifeline: a steady partner for collaborating, brainstorming, organizing, or language support—especially for non-native speakers—when it’s used as a tutor rather than a ghostwriter. 

    When used deliberately rather than passively, AI writing tools can sharpen critical thinking and creativity by acting as intellectual sparring partners. They generate ideas, perspectives, and counterarguments that challenge students to clarify their own reasoning instead of settling for first thoughts. Rather than accepting the AI’s output, discerning writers critique, refine, and reshape AI writing tools—an exercise in metacognition that strengthens their analytical muscles. The process becomes less about outsourcing thought and more about editing thought—transforming AI from a shortcut into a mirror that reflects the quality, logic, and originality of one’s own mind.

    When used correctly, AI jump-starts drafts and levels the playing field; leaned on heavily, it erases voice, short-circuits struggle, and replaces learning with mindless convenience

    Question You Are Addressing in Your Essay

    But can AI be used effectively, or does our interaction with it, like any other product in the attention economy, reveal that it is designed to sink its talons into us and colonize our brains so that we become less like people with self-agency and more like Non Player Characters whose free will has been taken over by the machines? 

    Writing Prompt

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay that answers the above question. Be sure to have a counterargument and rebuttal section. Use four credible sources to support your claim. 

    Suggested Outline

    Paragraph 1: Write a 300-word personal reflection about the way you or someone you know uses AI effectively. Show how the person’s engagement with AI resulted in sharper critical thinking and creativity. Give a specific example of the project that revealed this process. 

    Paragraph 2: Write a 300-word personal reflection about the way you or someone you know abuses AI in a way that trades critical thinking with convenience.  How has AI changed the brain and the person’s approach to education? Write a detailed narrative that dramatizes these changes. 

    Paragraph 3: Write a thesis with 4 mapping components that will point to the topics in your supporting paragraphs.  

    Paragraphs 4-7: Your supporting paragraphs.

    Paragraphs 8 and 9: Your counterargument and rebuttal paragraphs.

    Paragraph 10: Your conclusion, a dramatic restatement of your thesis or a reiteration of a striking image you created in your introduction. 

    Your final page: MLA Works Cited with a minimum of 4 sources. 

  • Discontinued at the Light

    Discontinued at the Light

    At a red light yesterday, ferrying my daughters home from school, my car-spotter’s radar pinged. I scan traffic the way birders scan treelines, always hoping for the rare specimen with that elusive look. Something unusual flashed past—and in a beat I clocked it: a 2023 Nissan Maxima, the model’s final year. A voice in my head muttered, “Discontinued.” The word tolled like a small funeral bell, as if it weren’t about the Nissan at all but about me. You’re nearly sixty-four. You are discontinued.

    I refuse to go out like that. Aging is one thing; embalming yourself in morbid commentary is another. I don’t want to spend the next twenty years muttering “discontinued” at traffic, toast, or mirrors. That’s not wisdom. That’s a tantrum with better vocabulary.

    Let’s call morbidity what it is: the childish whining of a narcissist. Who escapes aging? Only the people who don’t get the privilege. Getting old means you’ve been alive for a long time and you’re still here. The refrain—“Discontinued,” “You’re washed up,” “It’s all over”—isn’t just bleak; it’s lugubrious, a mental ailment missing from the DSM-5-TR. Fine, I’ll name it myself: narcissistic morbidity. You moan about your age until you bore everyone around you, including the poor soul trapped inside your skull. You act like you invented birthdays.

    What makes my case extra ridiculous is that I’m in decent shape. I work out. I eat a high-protein diet. Yes, I’m fifteen pounds over fighting weight, but I don’t look like a cautionary tale. I should be grateful, robust, hearty, glad. And yet the diseased little sportscaster in my cranium keeps calling the game: I’ll be driving my daughters, spot a car out of production, and use it as my cue to point at myself—“Discontinued.”

    If I were a comedian, this would be a layup: a man in his sixties drowning in self-pity, heckled by his own internal voice. There’s material for days. But punchlines only work if you know your heckler’s origin story.

    Here’s the reveal: the voice isn’t new. I’ve had it since childhood, a fog machine that kept me holed up drawing and reading while calamity forecasts scrolled across my mind. “The circus will be closed. A lion will escape. There’ll be a riot. Let’s not go. Don’t worry about me; I’ll entertain myself.” “The ice-cream place won’t have my flavor. Let’s stay home; I’ll eat cereal.” “If I throw a party, no one will come. Cancel my birthday this year—and the years after. Who needs a birthday anyway?”

    My gloomy companion even had a cartoon avatar: Glum, the tiny pessimist from The Adventures of Gulliver, late ’60s. Dressed in green, eternally peckish, and permanently resigned—“It’s hopeless.” “We’ll never make it.” “It’ll never work.” “We’re doomed.” He was my first soulmate: snack-oriented, catastrophe-forward.

    Back then TV specialized in a certain archetype—the Dead Weight Character—the one who drags the mission, sandbags morale, and sabotages the plan by simply existing. Land of the Giants fielded Commander Alexander Fitzhugh, a selfish criminal who once gnawed a giant scientist’s rabbit pellets and urged his tiny crew to feast with him because of “nutrition,” a word he repeated over and over as he consumed rabbit pellets. They saw humiliation; he saw survival. Dead Weight comes in many flavors.

    And then there was the greatest Dead Weight of them all: Dr. Zachary Smith of Lost in Space, immortalized by Jonathan Harris, patron saint of theatrical dread. His alliterative insults aimed at the Robot taught me that language could purr, hiss, and bite. Dr. Smith is, frankly, the reason I went to college and became an English major. If you’re going to sabotage a mission, at least do it with diction.

    So if I must live with an inner prophet of doom, I might as well upgrade his elocution. If the voice insists on heckling—calling me discontinued at stoplights and breakfast tables—then give it rhetorical muscle and meter. Let it speak in crafted sentences, not groans. Aging will still arrive right on schedule, but at least the narration won’t be dead weight.

  • The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz (piano excerpt)

    The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz (piano excerpt)

    When I was five, I watched The Monkees episode “I Was a 99-Pound Weakling.” Micky Dolenz, tired of sand in the face, starts lifting to steal back his dream girl from beach tyrant Dave Draper—Bulk himself. He returns a walking bicep, ready for triumph, and finds the blonde beauty arm hooked through a new idol: a skinny intellectual reading Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Micky’s expression does the math—pecs don’t beat paperbacks—and the lesson welded itself to my skull. Many years later, I’d write a piano composition, “The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz.” What follows is an excerpt from that longer work. 


  • In Defense of Watching True Crime

    In Defense of Watching True Crime

     A couple of weeks ago my wife DMed me an Instagram reel: one reviewer, dozens of true-crime docuseries. I pressed play and fell down the shaft. I binged everything—some episodes like gravel in the throat, others slick as a thriller—and realized I was hooked the way novels used to hook me: late nights, one more chapter, living on cliffhangers and bad coffee.

    A year ago I would’ve dismissed the whole genre as tabloid embalming fluid: pain turned into programming. That was the lazy take, the one you reach for when you haven’t looked long enough. The better work in this space isn’t cheap; it’s meticulous. At its best, it has social value.

    Watch the detectives. The strong series showcase minds like scalpels—profilers knitting together motive and method, investigators reconstructing a life from fibers and timestamps. The good ones don’t myth-make; they interrogate reality. Their craft can outstrip a screenwriter because the stakes aren’t applause—they’re truth and, sometimes, prison.

    Credit the pursuit, too. The suspect is slippery, the evidence thin, and still the chase continues—phone records, shoe tread, the geography of a lie. You can see how the work rewires them. They read a face like a ledger. They separate panic from performance. They carry that calibration into ordinary life, for better and worse.

    But the badge isn’t a halo. Some episodes show coercive interrogations, tunnel vision, a theory clung to past its sell-by date while exculpatory facts stack up in the corner. Those missteps belong in the record. A genre that can praise tenacity should also indict certainty when it curdles.

    What keeps me watching, beyond craft and cautionary tales, is the way communities assemble under pressure—search parties in neon vests, casseroles and candles, volunteers mapping creek beds while the cameras spin. These stories remind you how much ordinary goodness survives the worst day a town can have.

    Then there are the perpetrators, often undone by their own theater. The vanity is operatic: cryptic boasts, trophies kept, shoplifting while on the run because entitlement feels bulletproof. Not all are violent; some are artists of fraud whose lies cascade through bank accounts, marriages, and nervous systems. The harm is quieter, not smaller.

    The hardest stretch is the parents—the permanent gray in the eyes, the architecture of a life collapsed on one missing pillar. They stay decent, they organize scholarships and vigils, they become advocates—but you can see the subtraction. A part of them is gone, and the camera can’t restore it.

    I do feel the moral splinter: I’m consuming narratives built from someone else’s worst night. There’s a voice that hisses, How dare you. And a voice that answers: Then look harder. Don’t watch for spectacle; watch to learn—about procedure, about predation, about how to be a better neighbor and a sharper juror. The difference between voyeur and witness is attention and intent.

    So here I am, converted, with reservations. The good series map the borderlands between justice and error, courage and vanity, community and collapse. They don’t restore innocence; they invoice it. If I keep watching, it’s because the genre—at its best—insists on seeing clearly, and because clarity, though it stings, is a civic skill worth practicing.

  • Latte Palace at the End of the Earth

    Latte Palace at the End of the Earth

    Last night I dreamed that my mother and her family—gone twenty years and counting—came back to life as if they’d only stepped outside for air. No trumpet blast, no spectral fog. Just my aunt’s kitchen in Los Angeles: sunlight on the vinyl, the smell of coffee and waffles, forks tapping plates like tiny hammers. My mother kissed my cheek the way she used to, a quick press and a pat—quality control for the living.

    Between bites of waffles and scrambled eggs my grandfather announced, in the same voice he used for weekend errands, that we were driving to a mansion in Alaska. He said “mansion” as if it were around the corner, not at the end of the continent and a climate shift away. Heads nodded. Coats appeared. Dream logistics are ruthless: one cut and we were already rolling, my grandfather at the wheel of a weary sedan, a caravan of relatives stacking up behind us like punctuation.

    The city dissolved. Los Angeles flattened into a silver slab, then a bright white riddle. Snow stitched itself across the windshield; the tires made that soft, murderous hush you hear on ice. My grandfather drove with cheerful indifference to physics, tapping the wheel to music only he could hear. I watched the road bloom and vanish and thought: so this is how resurrection handles transportation—no chariot of fire, just black ice and a bench seat.

    We crested a hill and there it was: a palace poured in espresso and cream, a latte-colored sprawl with too many windows and the kind of confidence money wears when it doesn’t expect to be told no. Someone in the back called it “Politburo chic,” and the phrase snapped into place—midcentury power with an indoor fur policy. The façade implied heated floors and quiet compromises. The roofline looked like it had read every memo and approved half of them.

    What struck me wasn’t that my family had returned; it was how casual I felt about it. My mother was alive. My grandfather was alive. Aunts and uncles murmured behind me, inventorying snacks, debating rooms. And I sat there with the calm of a man who receives an impossible package on his porch and signs without reading the label. Maybe grief is software and last night the update finally took.

    We idled at the circular drive while the house regarded us with its many eyes. I tried to imagine the foyer: the smell of wax and cold marble, a staircase that curves with the arrogance of a purebred. My brain kept blurring the picture like a censor’s bar. I could sense chandeliers, a staff of refined butlers. 

    But I woke up before entering the mansion. Now more than anything, I feel tantalized by what was inside that mansion. Now I’ll never know. 

  • 30 Student Responses to the Question “What Effect Does Using AI Have on Us?”

    30 Student Responses to the Question “What Effect Does Using AI Have on Us?”

    Prompt:

    Begin your essay with a 400-word personal reflection. This can be about your own experience or that of someone you interview. Focus on how using AI writing tools—like ChatGPT—has changed your habits when it comes to thinking, writing, or getting work done.

    From there, explore the deeper implications of relying on this technology. What happens when AI makes everything faster and easier? Does that convenience come at a cost? Reflect on the way AI can lull us into mental passivity—how it tempts us to hand over the hard work of thinking in exchange for quick results.

    Ask yourself: What kind of writing does AI actually produce? What are its strengths? Where does it fall short? And more importantly, what effect does using AI have on us? Does it sharpen our thinking, or make us more dependent? Do we risk becoming less original, less engaged—more like passive consumers of technology than active creators? As this process continues, are we becoming Non-Player Characters instead of humans with self-agency? Explain. 

    Finally, consider the trade-offs. Are we gaining a tool, or giving something up? Are we turning into characters in a Black Mirror episode—so enamored with convenience that we forget what it means to do the work ourselves? Use concrete examples and honest reflection to dig into the tension between human effort and technological assistance.

    Student Responses to Using AI tools for writing and education:

    1. “I am impressed with the speed and convenience but the final product is overly polished and hollow.”
    2. “I am amazed by the speed of production but all the sentences look the same. Honestly, it’s numbing after a while.”
    3. “The writing is frustrating because it talks a lot without saying much.”
    4. “I don’t have to think as much,” “I save time not having to think” and “I get used to this laziness.”
    5.  “AI writes better than I do, but it doesn’t have my unique voice.”
    6. “AI is like a steady writing partner, always there to help me and bounce off ideas, but lately I realize the more I depend on it, the less I challenge myself to think critically.”
    7. “Thanks to AI, I stopped reading books. Now I just get summaries of books. Now I get the information, but I no longer have a deep understanding.”
    8. “AI helps me take notes and organize ideas but it doesn’t help me truly listen, understand someone’s emotions, show empathy, or deal with uncertainty.”
    9. “AI writing is smooth and structured, but people aren’t. Real thought and emotions are messy. That’s where growth happens.”
    10. “When I’m tired, AI tempts me to just copy and paste it, and the more I use it in this manner, the stronger the temptation becomes.”
    11. “AI makes things really easy for me, but then I ask myself, ‘Am I really learning?’”
    12. “What started out as magical now has become woven into the fabric of daily life. Education has become boring.”
    13. “AI is a production superpower the way it inspires and organizes ideas, but I find over time I become more lazy, less creative, and rely on AI way too much.”
    14. “AI degrades the way we write and think. I can tell when something is written in AI-speak, without real human tone, and the whole experience is dehumanizing.”
    15. “I love AI because it saved me. I am not a native English speaker, so I rely on AI to help with my English. It’s like having a reliable tutor always by my side. But over time, I have become lazy and don’t have the same critical thinking I used to have. I see myself turning into an NPC.”
    16. “I have to use AI because the other students are using it. I should have the same advantages they have. But education has become less creative and more boring. It’s all about ease and convenience now.”
    17. “I used to love AI because it made me confident and motivated me to get my assignments in on my time. But over time, I lost my voice. Now everything is written with an AI voice.”
    18. “The more I use AI, the less I think things through on my own. I cut off my own thinking and just ask ChatGPT. It’s fast, but it kills creativity.”
    19. “When faced with a writing assignment and a blank mind, I would start things with ChatGPT, and it got things going. It wasn’t perfect, but I had something to start with, and I found this comforting. But as I got more confident with ChatGPT, I became less and less engaged with the education process. My default became convenience and nothing more.”
    20. “AI writing is so common, we don’t even ask if the writing is real anymore. No one cares. AI has made us all apathetic. We are NPCs in a video game.”
    21. “AI is a great tool because it helps everyone regardless of how much money we have, but it kills creativity and individuality. We’ve lost the pleasure of education. AI has become a mirror of our own superficial existence.”
    22. “When I first discovered AI to do my writing, I felt I had hit the jackpot, but then after taking so many shortcuts, I lost the love for what I was doing.”
    23. “It’s stressful to see a cursor blinking on a blank page, but thanks to AI, I can get something off and running quickly. The problem is that the words are clean and correct, but also generic. There is no depth to human emotion.”
    24. “I’ve been using AI since high school. A lot of its writing is useless. It doesn’t make sense. It’s inaccurate. It’s poorly written. It’s dehumanizing.”
    25. “AI is basically Google on steroids. I used to dread writing, but AI has pushed me to get my work done. The writing is polished but too perfect to be human writing. The biggest danger is that humans become too reliant on it.”
    26. “I barely use AI. It makes school trivial. It’s just another social media disease like TikTok, these streaming platforms that kill our attention spans and turn us into zombies.”
    27. “AI first felt like having the cheat code to get through school. But then I realized it puts us into a cognitive debt. We lose our tenacity and critical thinking.”
    28. “I am a mother and an avid reader, and I absolutely refuse to use AI for any purpose. AI can’t replace real writing, reading, or journaling. AI is a desecration of education and personal growth.”
    29. At first, I used AI to get ideas, but over time I realized I was no longer thinking. I wasn’t struggling to come up with what I really thought or what I really wanted to argue about. AI silenced who I really was.”
    30. “Using AI to do the heavy lifting doesn’t sit right with me, so I programmed my AI to tutor and guide me through studying, rather than using it as a crutch by providing prompts and tools to help me understand assignments.While my experience with AI has shown me its full capabilities, I’ve also learned that too much of it can ruin the entire experience, in this case, the learning experience.”