At the end of February, the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees adopted its first artificial intelligence policy.

The board produced its policy statement with little attempt to engage faculty and students in meaningful discussions about the serious problems that may arise from AI.

At UT Martin, the Faculty Senate approved the board’s policy statement in late April, also without significant input from faculty or students.

In Section V of the document, “Policy Statement and Guiding Principles,” the first subsection states: “UT Martin embraces the use of AI as a powerful tool for the purpose of enhancing human learning, creativity, analysis, and innovation within the academic context.”

The document notes potential problems such as academic integrity, the compromise of intellectual property rights and the security of protected university data. But it does not address what may be the most dangerous and most likely consequence of AI’s rapid growth: the limiting of human learning, creativity, analysis and innovation.

Over the past two years, faculty in the humanities have seen students increasingly turn to AI, even for low-stakes assignments. AI allows students to bypass the effort of trying to understand a reading.

If students attempt a difficult text and struggle to make sense of it, they can ask AI to explain. More often, however, students skip reading altogether and ask AI for a summary, analysis or other grade-directed answers.

In approaching a novel, a historical narrative or even the social realities of our own time, readers start with limited knowledge of the characters, events or forces at play. To understand a character’s motives, the relationship between events, or the social, economic and political interests driving them, we must construct and refine a mental image—a hypothesis—through careful reading.

This process is the heart of education. Only by grappling with a text, a formula or a method for solving a problem do we truly learn. Without that effort, students may arrive at the “right” answer, but they have not gained the tools to understand the problems they face—or to live morally and intelligently in the world.

As complex as a novel or historical narrative may be, the real world is far more complex. If we rely on AI’s interpretation instead of building our own understanding, we deprive ourselves of the skills needed to engage with that complexity.

UT Martin’s mission statement says: “The University of Tennessee at Martin educates and engages responsible citizens to lead and serve in a diverse world.” Yet we fail this mission in many ways. Most students do not follow current events and are unaware of pressing issues. Few leave the university with a love of reading, despite its importance to responsible citizenship.

With this new AI policy, the university risks compounding these failures by embracing a technology that may further erode students’ ability to think critically about the world around them.