I, Me, Myself: Black Coffee and ChatGPT

Are you recording attendance for today’s class? Can I skip it? I have some very important work.

We are all too familiar with this question, asked before we even enter the classroom. It captures something educators and academics have been circling for a while: a transformation underway within today’s generation. Every student arrives with a different cultural and family background, and that alone makes engagement harder some days. Rarely does anyone ask, “Can you keep teaching a little longer, since we have a free period?” or “Can we just talk about the different cultures of the world?” Instead, classroom interactions can feel mechanical, even flat. There is a quiet detachment that sits inside the walls of a classroom. Some days, the room feels heavy with uncertainty.

One day, I decided to test these patterns with a bit of humor, curating my questions carefully in the hope of sparking real interest. To my surprise, the students responded with energy and answered in their own words. I started with, “What are the most important topics your friends talk about?” “Which artist is the biggest right now?” “What do you think of the millennial generation?” “Which athlete do you think is the fittest?” “Which running club have you joined?” “When do you go to the gym?” “Which AI platform runs the smoothest?” “Which YouTube channel do you follow?” The more I asked, the more they enjoyed the conversation, sometimes for hours, often witty, always sharp. I found myself surprised by how much they already knew. One thing I noticed: whatever has limited information online seems to intrigue them the most. Sooner or later, though, every conversation drifts back to AI, and to how often it gives ambiguous answers. Once they’ve said their piece, they tend to stop listening. Their attention has a ceiling; past a certain point, they simply check out.

A colleague once asked his class, “How do you describe success?” Silence. He tried again: “Come on, what does being successful mean to you?” Eventually, one student answered that success could be measured by the number of countries a person has visited. To us, that might sound vague. Within their circle, it carries real weight, a signal that someone is informed, plugged in, part of the group. Ask ChatGPT the same question, “What do you mean by success?”, and it answers: “Success is a personal and evolving concept. There is no single definition that applies to everyone. Broadly, success can be understood as achieving meaningful goals while living in accordance with your values and finding satisfaction in the process.” Over time, I began to notice something missing in how students express themselves, a kind of emotional flatness. Ask them to elaborate, to give an example, and they often go quiet. I don’t say this to disparage a generation. But something feels off: the pull toward being correct and rational seems to be pulling them away from their own instincts. Too many conversations start to sound like something generated, one plausible sentence following another.

What a Student’s Chat History Showed Me

To understand this better, I asked a student to sit with me and share his chat history, the one he uses constantly in daily life. I told him I was writing a reflective piece on how dependent this generation has become on AI tools, and he agreed to show me. The first message I saw read: “Hey ChatGPT, how are you doing today? Update me on worldly affairs so I can stay relevant and included in conversations.” ChatGPT replied, “Let me find something for you,” and surfaced the most talked-about stories of the past few weeks:

“If these topics come up, you could say”:

“The biggest global concern right now is the escalating U.S.-Iran conflict and its impact on oil prices.”

“AI governance is becoming a major international issue as countries race to regulate emerging technologies.”

It also briefed him on trending colors and songs among Western students. He told me many of his peers start their day with the exact same prompt. The risk here is the pressure to stay current enough to feel visible in the classroom or the friend group. Creativity and critical thinking seem to be quietly stalling. Communication between students has changed as a result; the habit of outsourcing thought to AI has, in some ways, made them less talkative, less willing to push back in conversation. Classroom teaching has grown harder, especially for those of us teaching language and communication. Institutions are folding AI into the curriculum without fully reckoning with what it might be doing, slowly, to the development of human thinking in young people. How does a child learn to think independently with unlimited AI tools a tap away? The brain tends to switch off when the answer is always one prompt away. I want to be clear: this reflection is not an argument against the tools themselves. It is an argument for accountability, and for encouraging children to think before they type.

And yet, teaching this generation is not without its wonder. As an educator who has spent the past several years in front of this cohort, I have come to believe that Gen Z may be the most extraordinary generation in history. Never before has this much knowledge been available to this many people at the touch of a screen. What once took hours in a library, or a string of conversations with experts, now takes seconds. But that unprecedented access comes with an uncomfortable paradox. Every generation is shaped by the technology of its time: the Agricultural Revolution changed what we ate and where we lived, the Industrial Revolution changed how we worked, the computer changed how we calculated, and the internet changed how we found and shared knowledge. Generation Z stands at the intersection of all of it, and now faces one more shift: the arrival of artificial intelligence as an active participant in their thinking. Being surrounded by information does not automatically make us better thinkers. Used uncritically, the very tools that widen our intellectual horizon can dull our instinct to question, to analyze, to imagine, and to reach our own conclusions. That pressure seems to make some students reluctant to voice uncertainty in class, even when uncertainty is exactly where learning starts.

Where I Push Back, and Where I Don’t

My course runs on discussion, on students putting their thinking into words in front of each other, which gives me a close view of how they approach a problem. My goal is to get them thinking critically and outside the frame they’re handed. What I have found is that Generation Z is genuinely up for that challenge; they enjoy real dialogue when it’s offered, rather than defaulting to ChatGPT. What troubles me is watching some educators nudge students toward AI as the answer key. Folding AI into the curriculum this way can quietly teach students that paraphrasing, in a formal tone or a fluent one, is the same as thinking. Children build resilience by sitting with uncertainty, not by having it resolved for them instantly. The harder question is what happens to human thinking once the effort of acquiring, processing, and producing knowledge can be handed off to a machine. The Agricultural Revolution transformed survival, the Industrial Revolution transformed work, the digital revolution transformed access to information. The AI revolution may be reshaping how we think itself (Holmes and Miao, 2023). If AI becomes the first stop rather than the last checkpoint, curiosity has a way of quietly going out. My own view is that AI should sharpen and elevate a student’s own ideas, not think on their behalf. Naming the gaps in your own understanding is what lets you actually engage with the world around you. And yet newer teachers often send students straight to an AI tool for anything they’re unsure of, which shapes what students come to expect from the student-teacher relationship itself. Too little attention, I think, is being paid to what this might do to human thinking over time, and to the legal questions that follow from it (Trimble, 2023).

Why did we choose this profession?
Why are we the ones pushing hardest for AI integration?
Why are we the ones putting the profession at risk?
What are we losing sight of, and why?

To pressure-test my own reflection, I struck up a casual conversation with a student during a work trip, the kind of conversation that usually drifts toward 90s music and what Gen Z is listening to now. This time I steered it toward how younger, less experienced faculty are shaping the system. What came out, half in jest, was that newer faculty are the ones most likely to point students toward AI for answers, leaving some students feeling like nobody is really teaching them. This is where the picture gets complicated. AI does not automatically make this generation less intelligent; it changes the setting in which intelligence gets used. When students use AI to stress-test an idea, explore a different angle, spot a hole in their own reasoning, or sharpen an argument, it can genuinely make them sharper. But when it substitutes for the thinking itself, when an answer is accepted before the question has really been sat with, it can slowly wear down the exact processes that build critical and creative thought. The paradox isn’t that we’re simultaneously the smartest and least capable generation. It’s that we hold an unprecedented amount of intellectual firepower alongside an equally unprecedented temptation to outsource the work of actually using it.

Students want affirmation from their teachers, which makes a nudge toward “just ask ChatGPT” a hard thing to sit with. Overused, these tools can dull the very abilities we’re meant to be building: interpreting a hard problem, following an argument to its end. Ask ChatGPT to define “life,” for instance, and the answer, however fluent, misses the human register entirely. At the same time, this generation is unusually well-informed, harder to fool, because information is so freely available to them. What they are looking for, I think, is not more information but a more engaging way to meet it. That takes real preparation on our end, and a willingness to let students arrive at conclusions that are actually their own.

Knowledge has to move quickly enough between us and our students that they look forward to being in the room, to the exchange itself. Critical thinking, from the Greek criticos, to judge, sits at the center of a good education. At its sharpest, judgment calls on real analysis and evaluation, the same skills we use to read what someone means, not just what they say, and to decide how to respond, whether the stakes are a classroom debate or a life decision like a career or a partner. Learning to think critically, in other words, is not optional (Hughes, 2024).

Teaching has gotten harder, and it keeps being reexamined, which is fair. This generation keeps exceeding what we expect of it, and in doing so is turning teaching into something more than instruction. Managing the psychological climate of a classroom well matters more than ever. I think we have reached a point where it is worth pulling back on AI in some settings and putting a book back in a student’s hands. That shift, I believe, would also help students speak more freely, meet real problems with more empathy, and say what they think without hesitating first. It is worth reminding ourselves why we started teaching in the first place, and standing firmly in the belief that AI cannot replace a human educator.

References

Holmes, Wayne, and Fengchun Miao. Guidance for Generative AI in Education and Research. UNESCO Publishing, 2023.

Hughes, Conrad. “Critical Thinking and Generative Artificial Intelligence.” UNESCO International Bureau of Education, 2024, https://www.ibe.unesco.org/en/articles/critical-thinking-and-generative-artificial-intelligence.

Trimble, Marketa. “Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.” GRUR International, vol. 72, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-2. https://doi.org/10.1093/grurint/ikac109.

About the Author

Rochna Roy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Basic Sciences (Humanities), School of Engineering, at Dayananda Sagar University, South Bengaluru, India. She teaches Engineering Communication and Technical Writing, Communication, and Personality Development to B.Tech and M.Tech (International) students, with a research interest in British and American Literature, Indian Writing in English, and contemporary approaches to language pedagogy. Correspondence: [email protected]

Cite this article

Roy, R. (2026). I, me, myself: Black coffee and ChatGPT. Society and AI. https://societyandai.org/perspectives/i-me-myself-black-coffee-and-chatgpt/

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