Professor Horrified When Students Use ChatGPT to Generate "Briefly Introduce Yourself" Assignment... in Ethics Course

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It's an open secret that students are increasingly turning to ChatGPT to generate essays and answers to their homework. Teachers are even starting to use the tool themselves, employing it to grade papers and create quiz questions.

The sheer extent to which the technology is entering classrooms remains astonishing.

AI on the Very First Assignment

As Business Insider reports, University of Arkansas at Little Rock philosophy professor Megan Fritts was startled to discover that her students had used ChatGPT on her very first assignment: a brief self-introduction asking them to “briefly introduce” themselves and “say what you're hoping to get out of this class.”

Worse still, this shortcut occurred in Fritts’ “ethics and technology” course.

“They all owned up to it, to their credit,” she told BI. “But it was just really surprising to me that—what was supposed to be a kind of freebie in terms of assignments—even that they felt compelled to generate with an LLM.”

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Generic AI Answers in an Ethics Class

Instead of sharing genuine expectations, the students’ AI-generated responses simply regurgitated standard descriptions of what an ethics class typically covers.

“A lot of students who take philosophy classes, especially if they're not majors, don't really know what philosophy is,” Fritts explained. “So I like to get an idea of what their expectations are so I can know how to respond to them.”

Fritts found the use of large language models particularly ironic in an ethics course. In a thread that went viral in early 2026, she wrote: “At this point LLMs-in-the-classroom apologists should be embarrassed. Students aren't just using this stuff as a ‘problem-solving tool’ or whatever BS people spout—they're using it to forget how to talk.”

“Impossible to be pessimistic enough about it, to be honest,” she added.

Missing the Point of a Humanities Education

To Fritts, relying on AI in a philosophy class undercuts the very purpose of a humanities degree. “The goal is to create liberated minds—liberated people—and offloading the thinking onto a machine, by definition, doesn't achieve that,” she told BI.

The AI hype that began in Silicon Valley has now spread across the entire education system. While proponents claim the technology opens new learning opportunities, critics remain deeply skeptical. For students entering education in 2026, AI tools are likely to become a standard part of their experience.

“The new generations will not be experiencing this technology for the first time,” Fritts noted. “They'll have grown up with it.”

“I think we can expect a lot of changes in the really foundational aspects of human agency,” she added, “and I'm not convinced those changes are going to be good.”

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