Stanford professor teaches his classes ‘tech-free’—here’s the skill he wants his students to build

I worry about my students' writing. Many professors do these days. A 2025 Inside Higher Ed survey found that 85% of undergraduates use AI in their coursework, and a large chunk simply let bots write essays on their behalf.

This has all made me very old fashioned. Every one of my courses is now held tech-free, and since 2024, exams in the Psych One Program I direct at Stanford University have been conducted via blue books. The bound paper booklets in which students hand-write their responses to test questions have surged in popularity during the AI explosion.

Why bother to make students write? There are many reasons, but I want to list three, which to me range from not at all convincing to absolutely vital.

1. We need to write to get our jobs done

In the past, writing was at the heart of a college education, in part because it was a vocational skill. Across almost every major and profession, reports must be written, emails sent, ideas shared, and typing done. These thousands of words might not have inspired but still needed to be created by hands and minds.

I no longer think this is a compelling reason to make college students write, or encourage anyone else to. If most meetings could have been emails, most emails can be automated. Workers, especially from younger generations, will find little incentive for crafting artisanal, small-batch memos.

2. We need to tend to our shared environment

You've probably seen trends in online writing. Sentence fragments. Bulleted lists. Groups of three. That's called "textual pollution."

Textual pollution represents all the ways that AI writing hurts the people around us. My colleagues at Stanford find that people often pass off "AI workslop," or unbaked deliverables gussied up by chatbots to seem sensible. Their colleagues then pay a workslop tax, having to make sense of long, disordered, messy material.

Social media overflows with posts that have the outline of something inspiring, vulnerable, or provocative, but are hollow underneath. Major television shows have been accused of generating trite plot points using AI. Scientific journals are flooded with low-quality submissions.

Research finds that AI flattens human writing towards a serviceable but boring average. Those stock phrases — "the real question is," "here's the thing no one's talking about," "and honestly?" — become signals that no one else cares enough to slow down. They create an ambient, intellectual cynicism.

We might write, then, not because others demand it of us, but as a gift to them. People love people, and language is the best vehicle ever created for human communion. An environment that replaces this with slop makes everyone worse off. Writing from the mind is a small act of resistance to that, and an act of service to our shared environment.

I find this reason quite compelling personally, and tell it to my students, but I don't expect them all to buy it. They might think that only chumps put in effort when others won't. They might think the "written environment" is a precious term I made up in my nostalgia for typewriters (they would not be wrong). They might find communion outside the written word. And all of that would be absolutely fine.

3. We need to keep our minds active

"Cognitive surrender" describes any time that someone allows AI to do their thinking for them. Researchers found that when given logic problems, most people who were given a chance to use AI did so. And when a bot produced the wrong answer, barely 20% noticed.

Writing is thinking. The blank page is terrifying because to fill it, we must wrangle a hurricane of thought into something ordered enough for someone else to understand. In doing so, we come to better understand our minds and to use them more sharply. Research finds that writing deepens critical thinking and improves memory. Writing about emotional events even reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression by helping us gain perspective.

When AI writes for us, we lose all of this. My students — or you — might protest that they still do the thinking, and merely use AI to produce output. But in many cases the struggle to put something into words is where the thinking happens, not before it. Absent the friction of putting thoughts into language, thinking dulls. In one study, students who used AI produced more scientific arguments more quickly — and almost all of them were shallower and lower in quality.

Here in San Francisco, I imagine a few people would answer this with some version of "who cares?" Soon, AI might not just be faster and more knowledgeable than us, but also have deeper scientific insights that produce greater progress than human minds can imagine.

If that strange future arrives, the nature of writing might change. As workers shifted from manual to white collar labor, more people began exercising recreationally, to keep their bodies healthy despite sedentary work. AI has already allowed us to become cognitively sedentary, and that will only increase over time. But just as we must be responsible for our bodies in an era of office work, we must now keep our minds active. Writing is a gym for human thought we need now more than ever.

Jamil Zaki is a full professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He and his colleagues study social connection, what that connection does for us, and how people can learn to connect more effectively. He is the author of "The War for Kindness" and "Hope for Cynics."

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This article has been excerpted and adapted from an installment of Jamil Zaki's Substack "The Spaces Between Us." It has been republished with permission.