How My Students Think About AI — LessWrong
Context: I am an instructor at a public university in the United States. This reports how students at my institution appear to be thinking about AI as of spring/summer 2026. This is drawn mostly from interaction with my own students (both in spring semester classes and a summer class) as well as from a day-long workshop on AI that I moderated for a student organization. Input from my students took the form of universal, written, pre-class submissions plus self-selected participation into discussion. What I present below mostly takes the form of a synthetic consensus from these discussions. There were obviously a range of views on any given issue. Student Background: The students from my courses who participated in these discussions have moderate exposure to AI agents via those courses. All of them had nearly completed a Claude Code project by the time of the discussions and had extensively used AI for other coursework (in addition to whatever personal use predates that). They h