A poster on the top floor of the Newman building, outside the philosophy department offices, reads, “You are smarter than AI”.
AI has increasingly become an ingrained part of university life. A 2024 survey at UCC and MTU found that 83.2% of students used AI “in some capacity” in their coursework. In July, The Times reported that almost 600 students at Irish universities were found to have illegally used AI in their graded coursework during the 2025/26 academic year. For the students choosing to opt out of AI, it means going against the grain.
The UCD’s 2023 ‘Strategic Alignment of Teaching and Learning Enhancement’ study on students’ AI use found that 89% of Social Sciences and Law students surveyed don’t regularly use ChatGPT for their coursework. Dr James Steinhoff, a lecturer who worked on the project, told The College Tribune: “I don’t think everyone was being completely honest. Based on speaking to students informally and just seeing people’s computers as I walk around the university, it appears that the usage is quite a lot higher”.
Sophia, a fourth-year medicine student and international student from New Jersey, notes that she avoids using generative AI if she doesn’t have to. “I pretty much decided not to use AI from the start; at first the reason was water usage, but now it’s more because of the data centres and all the land they take up… I just had to turn away from it”.
For Sophia, the environmental impact hits close to home. New Jersey hosts about 887 operational and planned data centres, which cover roughly 10 million square feet of floor space across the state. An average-sized data centre typically consumes approximately 100 million gallons (379 million litres) of water every year.
“My perspective is from the US, and recently there’s been controversy about data centres being built on native land there”, she notes. “There was an oil spill in one of the marshlands recently, linked to one of the data centres. We have a lot of biodiversity in New Jersey, so ecology is very relevant there – I mean, it’s relevant everywhere”.
Sophia notes that her main reasons for opting out are environmental and political. “I would feel guilty if I used it”, she adds.
Not every student who opts out sets out to do so. A recent MSc Human Rights graduate noted that they simply never started: “AI was only gaining popularity in the final year of my undergraduate degree, and I had little knowledge of what it was, so I never used it”. By the time they returned for their Master’s, AI “seemed quite prevalent across campus”, but they kept their distance.
Their reasons have since caught up with the habit: “I am very wary that AI will go in the same direction as social media”, with safeguards and legislation “playing catch-up trying to protect people, particularly young people”. Like Sophia, they also point to the climate: “I find it disheartening that at a time when climate goals are already going unmet, AI is now playing an additional active role”.
AI’s reach on campus extends beyond essays and exam prep. The SATLE study found that many students were turning to AI for what researchers called “pastoral care”: a form of emotional support. Students like that it is “a non-judgmental space”, says Steinhoff. But he is wary: “Talking to a simulation of a person is not the same as talking to a real person”. Sophia, who works part-time for a suicide hotline in the US, has a different opinion: “A lot of people will come to us and be like ‘Oh, ChatGPT said I need to reach out to you guys’”.
When asked whether it is possible to avoid AI completely in a world that is increasingly integrating it, Sophia responds: “I think it’s possible to avoid AI completely, yes, but you have to be very conscious and purposeful about that”.
Steinhoff isn’t surprised. “It’s getting harder and harder to opt out of it totally, isn’t it? I think this is actually a strategy that the AI industry is consciously employing, to get everyone hooked on it whether they want to or not”.
Does opting out come at a cost? “It probably makes me a little bit slower”, Sophia admits. “So maybe that is a disadvantage. I’ve never really considered it before”. But she doesn’t believe she’ll be left behind, noting, “I’m still in the loop”. Other students have seemingly felt that pressure too; one notes feeling the push to use AI whilst job hunting. “However, I’m happy in my knowledge that everything I produced during my degrees and all my applications are written and researched by me”.
For Steinhoff, that slowness is the point. “The ones who opt out, I think, are really interested in actually learning stuff. I don’t think you learn that much if you outsource your assignments to an AI”. He continues, “AI writes like people write on LinkedIn, and students are increasingly writing like they’re on LinkedIn”. The graduate student shares the concern. “It worries me that the ease AI provides will see an increase in cognitive offloading across schools and universities”.
For these students, the extra effort is part of the point. “Doing the boring stuff is, unfortunately, how you actually learn and get better at things”, says Steinhoff, “it’s like driving; you won’t really get better at it unless you do it over and over”.
Whether that choice will hold is a completely different question; perhaps in the future, opting out won’t even be an option. As journalist Mark Little tells The College Tribune: “The burden of AI is heavier on a generation that has already been denied a compelling vision of the future”.
By: Anastasia Glushchenko