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At the start of a school year, there will always be changes: new dorm rooms, new classes, and new faces on campus.

This year, all Harvard students also gained a new study buddy: ChatGPT.

In an email to the college, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education, Academic Programs and Policy Gillian B. Pierce ’88 announced that students would be granted access to ChatGPT Edu in efforts “to explore the uses of AI to enhance Harvard’s teaching and research mission.” Since then, I have heard overwhelmingly positive AI policies in every class I’m taking, encouraging the use of ChatGPT to help with conceptual understanding.

A recent study from a Harvard physics class, for example, highlights the use of AI in helping students learn more in shorter periods by encouraging them to have conversations with a personalized chatbot. Their AI tool, dubbed PS2 Pal, presents questions that students answer and get interactive, personalized feedback on.

The rapid integration of AI into nearly all my classes has come as quite a shock. I rarely used ChatGPT before the past two weeks out of paralyzing fear about violating academic integrity policies, discerning the accuracy of the information collected, or improperly citing the tool’s help.

But already, PS2 Pal has become a good friend of mine — so much so that I feel no need to go to office hours, open a textbook, or work through problems with peers. Any basic conceptual question I have is reliably answered in a couple of seconds.

I am concerned by this change.

In the past weeks, the way that I approach my classes has been less personal. I can sit at my desk and do my entire assignment with ChatGPT answering questions I have about inverting matrices or debugging code. There seems to be no need to meet up with friends and discuss the class work because talking to ChatGPT can give me better help faster.

Although I’m by no means barred from accessing resources like office hours and peer tutoring, the mere convenience of ChatGPT makes it a more appealing resource to turn to for help.

As I do so, I am aware that I am getting a single solution to any question, rather than the five or ten different ways of thinking I might encounter if I asked the same questions to a group of peers. In short, I’m worried we could lose diversity in the ways we learn and interact with course material as students become reliant on ChatGPT’s perspective alone.

I have certainly learned much from observing what my classmates are doing correctly or incorrectly, and why they approach a question a certain way. It helps me to think about concepts from different perspectives. With ChatGPT, any questions I have typically come with one scripted answer.

Learning how to access these different perspectives in primary sources like textbooks and papers is something else that ChatGPT makes obsolete. Students can get answers about any topic by asking GPT to summarize a source, rather than engaging with it firsthand through libraries or journals. As we shift toward relying on AI for information, I also worry we deprive ourselves of the skills necessary to critically read, evaluate, and apply information, taking what ChatGPT provides as fact.

In this post-Covid era, with (partly) online education here to stay, digital tools have become essential in the classroom. Programs such as Kahoot, an online quizzing system, and Quizlet, a website with digital flashcards, genuinely augment the educational experience. But the breadth of ChatGPT is significantly greater than these tools — it is fast becoming more akin to an instructor than an implement.

Like with any new technology, it is healthy to harbor some skepticism about AI’s new role. While Havard’s incorporation of AI in the classroom may be a much-needed pilot study, we should not forget the importance of the latent learning that happens in peer-to-peer educational settings and from persevering through the slog of manual research and problem-solving.

Struggling through classes, and spending time discussing concepts with peers is critical for developing skills in thinking flexibly about problems and reaching unique and original solutions. Courses that use or are considering using AI as a tutor should remember to encourage students to engage with one another and the course staff. ChatGPT is a fantastic new technology, but it’s no substitute for the hard work of in-person learning.

Sandhya Kumar ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a joint concentrator in Molecular & Cellular Biology and Statistics in Winthrop House.