via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

Leaning into learning means creating a new “social contract” between teachers and students. All of us who teach at MIT will need to be prepared to help students understand both that the process of education is necessarily a productive struggle, and that the most important product of their education is not a GPA or a diploma but themselves: their personal growth and intellectual maturity and the development of their own imagination, insight, and judgment.

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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

“AI threatens the shared social fabric of MIT and creates new risks to the well-being of our students. MIT needs to invest in creating shared norms, establishing new community rituals, and addressing new academic, social, and emotional challenges introduced (or exacerbated) by AI.”

Published on August 13, 2026.

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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

For their part, students fear being wrongly accused of AI cheating and are increasingly frustrated by instructors’ use of AI in areas that demand a human touch, such as grading, assignment creating, and feedback. Such an underground river of mutual suspicion is no foundation for a healthy classroom.

Published on August 13, 2026.

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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

“Students need to believe that doing the work themselves is in their self-interest. It will take more than top-down AI use policies to inspire that conviction. As a community, we need to cultivate a campus culture in which (1) AI restrictions that instructors impose clearly support student learning, personal growth, and professional success; and (2) students have a shared culture that values and fosters residential learning and discourages excessive reliance on AI.”

Published on August 13, 2026.

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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

As a community, we need to keep in mind that although research is central to MIT’s mission, it’s more than an end in itself; on our campus, research is also an apprenticeship, a means of training the next generation of researchers to continue our work and drive our fields of inquiry forward. Using research as an opportunity for learning-by-doing may produce seeming “inefficiencies,” but that’s a feature, not a bug.

Published on August 13, 2026.

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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

Facing a technology that already has such immense capabilities – built on, modeled after, and in many ways now exceeding human powers – the Institute’s fundamental challenge and most important goal must be to nurture and protect our shared humanity, and to value the MIT community, its members, and their flourishing above all.

Published on August 13, 2026.

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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

“MIT should use this moment to ask what forms of presence, collaboration, mentorship, and shared intellectual life are essential to residential education – and then design AI policies, pedagogies, and research practices that strengthen them rather than allow their erosion, replacement, or collapse.”

Published on August 13, 2026.

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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

AI has arrived at a moment when the social foundations of campus life are already under strain. Across higher education, students report10 high levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and disconnection. Confidence in institutions has weakened, political polarization has made campuses more fragile, and the post-pandemic recovery of in-person communities remains incomplete.

Published on August 13, 2026.

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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

Society tends to peg the “birth” of a new technology as the point when it becomes readily usable. By that measure, generative artificial intelligence was “born” with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Public engagement with generative AI is therefore less than four years old. In that time, it has amassed more than a billion users, and the companies selling AI technology have come to dominate the headlines, the stock market, and public consciousness.

Published on August 13, 2026.

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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.

Published on August 13, 2026.

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