Students say they appreciate AI’s ability to organize ideas and improve flow, but many also recognize that what comes out often feels “robotic,” emotionally flat, or uncanny in tone. Still, convenience almost always wins. Reflection is hard, and AI makes things easy.

I don’t fault students for wanting help. Writing about your life, especially the difficult parts of it, is exhausting. It’s often cathartic, yes, but also demanding and destabilizing. I worry that when students hand off that work to a machine, they forfeit something essential: the self-knowledge that comes from shaping a chaotic experience into a coherent, personal truth. — Ellen O’Connell Whittet, The Chronicle of Higher Education