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Clausen is an author and professor at the University of San Diego. He lives in Escondido.

This academic year I entered my 56th year of college teaching. Yes, thats over half a century of anticipating what I would experience with the newest group of college students when I entered my university classroom. Never before had I been more apprehensive. Let me explain.

I taught my first college-level writing class in 1968. I was a teaching assistant at the University of California Riverside, and I was only a few years older than the freshmen I would be meeting the very next day. I didnt sleep well that night. As a student, I didnt often participate in classroom discussions. I usually sat in the back of the room and listened. Sometimes I daydreamed. Now, I was expected to lead those discussions.

That thought was more than a little frightening.

I was entering the college teaching profession in the middle of the Vietnam War. That was also a concern. Students at many campuses were known to take over classrooms and use them to deliver antiwar lectures. The very real possibility existed that I would have to yield my classroom to an ardent antiwar extremist. I shared some of their concerns about the Vietnam War, since I had a close friend who lost his brother in the conflict. Still, I was hesitant to give up my class to them.

My first class went OK. I managed to get through the discussion without revealing too much about my amateur status as a college teacher. Subsequent years had other challenges that often made it difficult to teach. Financial struggles, personal losses and a pandemic, all took a toll. Still, I overcame those challenges and learned to love the profession I had entered almost by accident.

This year was different. I didnt face antiwar activists or others with deeply felt ideological concerns. I had students who are so dependent on technology that I fear they are turning over the power of thinking to distant, even potentially authoritarian influences.

Cellphone usage has been a problem in our nations classrooms for years. However, the new artificial intelligence technologies and their implications for education exceed anything I have ever confronted. My responsibility as a teacher of literature and writing is to motivate students to confront their own humanity in many different contexts. Then I encourage them to explore their personal reactions to literary classics. Over several days and even weeks, they are challenged to write multiple drafts of an essay. This also requires them to think and rethink the essay prompt until it penetrates to some deeper level of their own consciousness.

Recently, however, I have noticed a growing number of student essays that are more formulaic, written in a tone and style that sounds subtly robotic and seldom penetrates to a deeper level of the students thinking process.

I did not know it at the time, but that was my first introduction to the presence of AI-generated writing in my classroom. The students presence in those essays gradually faded and was replaced by an intelligent-sounding, albeit artificially contrived human voice. That voice seemed to bypass the many stages of deeper thinking that reflect more sophisticated cognitive growth.

I realize my options in confronting these new slightly robotic voices are limited. I can pretend it is the students own writing, and we can both engage in an elaborate charade of feedback that is meaningless to both of us. I can announce rigid penalties for AI-generated essays, and then read student written work primarily to determine whether or not it violated those restrictions. I can move all writing in-class and deny students the essential educational experience of learning to think and rewrite their own prose over a sustained period of time. Or I can simply ignore my own lying eyes and accept the many articles and essays that are encouraging educators to work with AI in the classroom.

Yes, I have probably outlasted my time in a university classroom. I admit that. But I cant get over my concerns that a nation that condones plagiarism of intellectual properties and outright cheating is setting a very bad example for future generations. Even more important, it is denying young people the opportunities they truly need to develop their full potential as human beings.

This year, when I entered my classroom, I was concerned I would be looking at many students who will never reach their full potential because they have given up too much of their unique identities to todays electronically driven educational system.

That worried me even more than the sleepless night over half a century earlier when I was about to teach my first class.

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Opinion: How artificial intelligence has changed my students - The ... - The San Diego Union-Tribune