Spell "Adult Learning" Without AI

There's a recent opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed by USC writing professor Patricia Taylor in which she makes claims that students using generative AI to help write are outsourcing the cognitive effort that makes thinking possible and outsourcing the task of writing itself. That's my read of it. She is writing for higher ed broadly, but I keep thinking about what this means for adult learners. 

Taylor pushes back on two popular framings of AI and writing. The first, "writing is just a proxy for thinking," suggests that educators shouldn't worry about AI-generated essays because what we really care about is the thinking behind them. The second, "writing is thinking," argues that writing is so integral to cognition that you can't separate the two. Taylor's counter is that both framings miss the fact that writing isn't thinking itself. Writing is the set of tools humans developed to manage the cognitive load that thinking in language requires. When AI generates that language for a student, it steps in front of a process the student's brain was supposed to do.

This framing resonates with me with an important distinction for adult learners. Consider a 34-year-old healthcare administrator enrolled in an online Bachelor of Professional Studies in Organizational Leadership & Development program. She understands billing and remittance workflows from years in professional administrative roles. What she's less sure about is how to frame that knowledge in an academic policy analysis. Using AI to translate her professional fluency into a paper isn't the same as outsourcing her thinking. The thinking starts with her experience. AI is helping her get it onto the page in the generic academic form her professor expects. Same idea for a BPS in Project Management student who knows Agile inside and out who uses AI to get unstuck on structure, then  steps in with the substance he's already worked through on his own. That feels meaningfully different to me than a student who skips the thinking altogether. 

I also think adults who've spent years in professional environments have already built solid reasoning habits. Their cognition isn't as vulnerable to erosion from AI assistance as that of a 19-year-old still forming those habits. But here's where it gets complicated a bit for me. The same features that make adult learners seem lower-risk can also make them higher-stakes. Adults often return to school to upskill and advance their careers, and BPS curricula are specifically designed to exploit their professional experience. Taylor's caution that the more we outsource language management to AI, the harder we'll find it to manage our own thinking, is real and something we should foreground in our teaching.

I'm not sure "writing as proxy" and "writing as thinking" are as mutually exclusive as they're sometimes framed. For most adult learners, the gap between these two positions is actually kind of normal and maybe something of a buffer for those of us who teach adults. My real discomfort is that AI use often feels like a productivity gain while it's quietly undermining the skills and competencies that a BPS degree is supposed to build.