Students using AI for assignments miss the point of writing, expert says
Schneier proposes ‘work vs gym’ test for AI use decisions
Bruce Schneier, a security technologist who teaches public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Toronto’s Munk School, published an opinion piece in The Guardian on July 24 laying out what he described as a simple way to decide whether to use artificial intelligence for a given task. He credited the core distinction to AI researcher Daniel Meissler.
Schneier wrote that the decision depends on whether the task is “work” — where the output is the only thing that matters — or “the gym” — where the process of doing the task is itself the point. “At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift … even an AI-powered robot,” he wrote. “But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.”
Schneier applied the distinction directly to education. He said his students regularly use AI to complete writing assignments, a practice he called a waste of tuition money. “The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks,” he wrote. He assigns policy memos not because the world needs more of them, but because the act of writing — “thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments” — develops critical thinking skills. He said that without that mental exercise, “those skills will atrophy.”
He said he can tell the difference between an AI-written memo and a student-written one, describing AI output as “a catchy, plausible, grammatically perfect essay that’s not particularly well-crafted or logically coherent.” He noted that his students often lack the experience to recognize that, mistaking confident prose for quality ideas. “What the students miss is that their initial discomfort is a normal and healthy stage of writing, and not something to quickly get beyond,” he wrote.
Schneier extended the framework to creative professions. He argued that most paid writing — instruction manuals, sales presentations, legal briefs — is “work” that AI can handle well, while only a fraction is “gym,” such as books, poems, or political speeches. “For most of human history, the only option for all of these tasks were human writers,” he wrote. “Now, for the first time in human history, we can separate out when we need writing as work and when we want writing as gym.” He said the same logic applies to visual artists: the world needs more simple images than pure art, and AI can fill much of the work-type demand.
Despite his arguments, Schneier acknowledged that his students continue to use AI. He cited peer pressure — students feel they will look bad if their peers use AI — and an incentive problem. “No one pays us to go to the gym; maintaining healthy habits requires discipline,” he wrote. He said the payoffs to cognitive exercise, like incremental improvements in reasoning, are subtle and easy to miss.
Schneier urged readers to deliberately wall off “cognitive gym tasks” from AI, just as someone might choose stairs over an elevator. “We can look at the tasks of our lives and separate them into work or gym,” he wrote. “If it’s a gym task, it’s a waste of everyone’s time to give it to an AI because no one learns or gets stronger as a result.”