An AI chatbot was used as a discussion partner when a philosophy professor at Ohio State asked his students to write about ethics. One of them returned with a paper about the custom of returning shopping carts and karma. He referred to it as one of his favorites. That little, somewhat ridiculous, strangely human detail reveals more about Ohio State’s true goals than any official statement could.
The university declared last year that all of its undergraduate students, regardless of major, would have to become “bilingual”—fluent in both their primary field of study and the real-world applications of artificial intelligence within that field. AI Fluency is an initiative that goes beyond simply adding a tech elective to the course offerings. Beginning with the incoming freshman class, it integrates AI education directly into the undergraduate curriculum with the aim that every graduate from the class of 2029 onward will leave Columbus with the knowledge necessary to collaborate with these tools in an ethical manner.
The framing is intentional. The moral panic that has engulfed so many faculty lounges—the agonizing discussions about honor codes, plagiarism detectors, and whether ChatGPT is subtly undermining academic integrity—is avoided by referring to it as bilingualism. In essence, Ohio State’s stance is that the ship has sailed. According to the Pew Research Center, 26% of teenagers used ChatGPT for academic purposes in 2024—twice as many as the previous year. Approximately 90% of college students had already used ChatGPT on assignments, according to a survey done just two months after the app’s launch. According to one associate professor, outlawing it would be “shortsighted.”
It is worthwhile to take a moment to consider how the initiative truly operates. Education majors are required to use AI to create a lesson plan, submit their initial prompt along with an assessment of the machine’s output, and then make revisions. The goal of the exercise is to make the student’s thinking readable rather than interchangeable by clearly incorporating human judgment. It seems almost pedagogically archaic: present your work, but now “the work” includes challenging the presumptions of a chatbot.
Although it has been less noticeable than one might anticipate, the backlash is genuine. Grading papers that seem hollowed out—competent on the surface, strangely evasive underneath, as if the student never quite made it to the page—has been described by some professors. Some are concerned about a more structural issue: mandates such as this one show an institutional tendency to produce graduates in large quantities for the workforce rather than fostering the slower, more difficult-to-measure traits that a true education is meant to cultivate. It’s a legitimate worry that the initiative doesn’t entirely address.
Additionally, there is a gap that is frequently overlooked in the upbeat statements. AI can be used by high achievers as a truly generative tool, a thinking partner that helps them refine their own arguments. It could be used as a crutch by struggling students, causing them to lag behind in the skills that genuinely need practice and discomfort. The university’s framework doesn’t make that asymmetry go away.
However, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that Ohio State is at least posing the true question: how to maintain human thought at the core of an education that increasingly revolves around AI, rather than whether AI belongs in the classroom. It will take a few years to determine whether the curriculum they have created is truly capable of doing that. The 2029 class has yet to graduate. The experiment is still ongoing.
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