What does it mean to be an educated person in the era of AI?

Artificial intelligence is reshaping education and the workplace. Universities face growing questions about how students develop and demonstrate knowledge. Yet the foundations of learning remain remarkably constant.

The late Sir Eric Thomas, former president of Universities UK and member of Studiosity’s UK academic advisory board, said: "The single most important output of a university is its students. They are the people who go out and form the society of the future."

That insight matters more today than ever. We are living through a moment when the very idea of an educated person is being called into question by technology, society and even by governments. What does it mean to be an educated person in the era of AI? I don’t believe it has changed at all. But the stakes – both for society and universities – have changed beyond recognition.

Last year, researchers at MIT sat fifty-four people down to write essays. Some used ChatGPT; others used nothing but their own minds. And they recorded the brain activity of each group as they worked.

Those who wrote unaided showed the strongest, most connected neural activity. Those who leaned on the machine showed the weakest. When the AI group were later asked to write the same thing again, unaided, many could not quote the essay they had produced minutes before. They had generated the words, but in any real sense, they had never thought them. Researchers called what they had witnessed cognitive debt. The mind was quietly borrowing against the future of its owner. 

We have all been impressed by the capabilities of large language models, whose primary use case is increasing human productivity. However, education is a unique sector where real learning happens when the productive struggle is embraced, not avoided.

The academic essay is the unsung hero of critical thinking. It works because it is hard. Writing demands struggle, introspection and persistence before it delivers insight. That difficulty is not a flaw to be engineered away, it is the entire point. The muscles of the mind need friction to grow. This doesn’t mean we have to oppose AI. The same MIT study found those who wrote with their own minds and then reached for AI stayed engaged. Those who reached for it first did not. Think first. Then augment. Not the other way round. And what is true of the academic essay, I believe, to be true across all of higher education.

To those who feel a protective instinct about the productive struggle and sense that rigour, evidence, and the difficult essay are worth defending: I want to urge you to trust that instinct. It is not nostalgia. It is not resistance to innovation. It is fiduciary duty. You are the stewards of the one asset your institution cannot survive without: credibility. Protecting it is the most strategic and responsible thing you can do. Innovate boldly - but do so without abandoning the principles that made higher education worth having in the first place. Signal to students what matters, and assess for it. Trust - and verify.

British universities now see over a million graduates enter society each year and a few of them will change the world. Sir Eric believed this was the most important thing a university contributes to our societies and democracy: whom it sends out into the world. It is a view that remains just as relevant today. Because if we allow a generation to offload the very struggle that forms them, we do not merely graduate weaker students. We build weaker societies and democracies and every one of us will have to live in them.

That is a choice. And it rests, largely, with those shaping the future of higher education. AI is reshaping the world at bewildering speed. But the human brain, and the way we learn, remain much as they were pre-ChatGPT. If AI is to serve us, rather than the reverse - then human development must come first. Some in Silicon Valley may view the productive struggle - and even humanity - as a bug. I happen to believe we’re a feature.