By Alice Speri
Publication Date: 2026-03-10 13:00:00
Lea Pao, a literature professor at Stanford University, is experimenting with ways to get her students to learn offline. She has them memorize poetry, perform at recitation events, and view art in the real world.
It’s an attempt to reconnect them with the physical experience of learning, she said, and stop them from turning to artificial intelligence to do the work for them. “There is nothing that is AI-safe,” Pao said. “Rather than police it, I hope their overall experience in this course shows them that there is a way out.”
It doesn’t always work. She recently asked students to visit a local museum, look at a painting for 10 minutes, and write a few paragraphs describing the experience. It was a purposefully personal assignment, but one student responded with a challenging but monotonous reflection—”too perfect without saying anything,” Pao said. She later learned that the student had tried to visit the museum on a Monday when it was closed, and then…