St. Olaf College does not place strict limits on artificial intelligence use, a school policy that has become a source of debate as these digital tools rapidly evolve. According to the college library website, AI may be incorporated into coursework if instructors provide “instructions and a transparent process” for students to use it. Still, students and faculty across disciplines have raised concerns not only about AI’s role in academic work, but also about its potential biases and environmental impact.

Their questions extend beyond grades alone. As AI becomes more integrated into coursework, some on campus are asking how it might shape the very way students think and learn.

Some people within St. Olaf — students and staff alike — strive to find the easiest solutions to problems instead of chewing on the subject for longer. This, of course, does not apply to everyone, but many look for the fastest way to write an essay or to get an assignment done, whether that is because of a lack of time or a lack of caring. In the end, the result is the same: a loss of potential knowledge that could have been earned. This leads to the snowball effect of more and more art being stolen and recycled into new creations without any intent behind said art, leading to a homogenization art that drifts away from its original meaning. 

In an interview with The Olaf Messenger, Associate Professor of English and Director of Film and Media Studies Linda Mokdad said she is concerned about how AI affects the research process.

“I worry about the process of getting to an answer,” Mokdad said. “Will there be no interaction with the source material, just an immediate answer? The lack of understanding of the first step of the research is what scares me.” 

Some faculty warn that reduced engagement with source material could lead to weaker comprehension and a blending of ideas that obscures individual perspectives. Critics point to the environmental costs of expanding data infrastructure and the use of existing creative works to train AI systems.  These issues raise broader ethical questions about ownership, authorship and the line between assistance and appropriation. If not kept in check, this could lead to a colonization of ideas from AI where the student’s ideas are combined with others.  

Many professors worry about the future of idea creation within education. 

“I worry that a homogeneous idea of thought will soon happen with AI becoming more prominent,” Mokdad said.

For professors such as Mokdad, this is the last thing they wish to encounter within their classrooms. Many involved in academia, and especially in the liberal arts, want the challenging of ideas, not the forced conformity of what the world has already concluded, especially in subjective fields like English and film. These majors are all about the collaboration between differing ideas, bringing together experiences and influences to create something new and beautiful that cannot just be boiled down into AI slop. The art humans make, whether for an assignment or as a passion project, will always hold more value than what AI creates.      

It is not only professors who worry about AI usage, but students, too. Mathea Benson ’27 — an English, Spanish, and gender and sexuality studies major — is especially feeling AI’s impacts. 

In an interview with The Olaf Messenger, Benson noted that they hope to become a literary translator and offered some insight into the role AI might play in the process. “[It’s] sort of not something that AI can do right now,” they said. “Literary translation requires knowledge of themes and all that. I am not convinced it will stay that way; I think that AI will become better at translating larger works.” 

Benson also works as a supplemental instruction (SI) leader for beginner-level Spanish classes, where AI was introduced as a tool for learning and teaching during their start-of-semester training — notably, for the first time since they began the position in 2024. 

“We were told that it could be a helpful tool,” Benson said. “There was a lesson on using it, but none of us really participated because we’re not really in favor of AI.” 

When asked why they are not in favor of usage of AI in this setting, Benson cited concern about its environmental impacts and their belief in the importance of doing one’s own work. Their statements were also echoed by Mokdad, who stated that it’s “horrifying how ecological[ly] violent AI is.”

Benson’s experience reveals how AI is being inserted into processes of teaching, and many instructors — like Benson — remain vehemently against it. But AI’s growing presence is not limited to the humanities.

“It’s weird being a computer science major because when I started college, that was, like, a guaranteed job. Now it’s not — because of AI — so that’s definitely changed things,” Rowan Zimney ’27 said in an interview with The Olaf Messenger.

Zimney also noted a distinct change in the content of computer science classes since starting at St. Olaf, especially in his current “Ethical Issues in Software Design” course.

 “[AI] is much more relevant now, and a lot of the ethics class has been talking about AI, which might not have been the case [in years past],” he said. 

While Zimney did state that AI can be useful in finding missing or broken pieces of code in computer programs, they do not have such a positive sentiment towards some of its other uses. As a double major in computer science and creative writing, he has noticed drastic differences in the way AI tools are employed in scientific and creative settings. 

“AI graders will flag 97% of essays written [by] non-native English speakers as having used AI, even when they didn’t,” Zimney said. “The language probably just sounds too formal because that’s how you’re generally taught languages.” 

This shocking statistic comes from a 2023 study by Stanford University and emphasizes the disproportionate impact many AI models have on non-native English speakers. Furthermore, this can be seen as language-based discrimination, punishing those who speak something different than what AI models consider standard. 

“The use of AI can invite us to not trust our own ideas,” Mokdad said. “A huge part of scholarship is influences and borrowing, but that also means that the individual who is inspired by the work has to understand the work they are referencing. AI does not understand the work they are referencing. AI does not understand the art; it just recycles its main components for its own benefit with no nuance behind it.”  

Interviews across campus suggest there is no clear consensus on where AI serves as a helpful tool and where it becomes overreach. One idea is clear, however — the fear that AI is stealing space in student’s minds and the land they live on is present in today’s society. Every day, more and more forms of AI are added to different programs, whether educational or technological. With these new additions of AI comes more need for data centers and, in the end, more land lost in our country to stolen ideas.