Story By Hailey Cylinder, Nina Weiland and Rebecca Worthington / Multimedia producers

AI is being used — that’s no longer debatable. But how it’s being used, why it’s being used, and when it should be used were central themes of a recent podcast discussion led  by students who spoke with top administrators, librarians and  professors at Delaware Valley University.

This podcast is called Tea Talks, where students at DelVal bring up important conversations and ‘spill the tea’ on what’s hot right now. 

Vice President of Academic Affairs Dr. Gloria Oikelome (“Dr. O”) opened the discussion with humor but also realism about AI’s rapid rise on campus.

“Our students have discovered AI in all kinds of ways,” she said. “We have faculty and staff who are using it for different things. So for me the first solution is what we always do in higher ed when we don’t know how to handle something. We form a committee.”

She went on to say that the school has created an AI task force because “we need to hear from all voices.” 

The task force includes administrators, staff, faculty, and students, and its goal is to create guidelines for AI even though the topic comes with potentially controversial debate. 

Claire Drolet, the Access Services Librarian at DelVal, is on that AI task force, which expects to release guidelines by the spring 2026 semester.

Will AI Replace Research? 

Drolet emphasized the tension librarians are feeling as students increasingly turn to AI tools instead of traditional databases.

“It’s kind of rocking the library world in, ‘oh, is this going to replace all the search engines, all the databases, the journals, and everything?’ ” she said. “And I think very resolutely, no.”

She said the library is seeing both fascination and confusion among students. While AI can help students brainstorm or argue a topic, she warned there are major concerns surrounding transparency and legality.

“A lot of these AI (programs) are saying, I can give you everything, but how they got it is a mystery and sometimes not legally,” she said.

The English Department Chair Dr. Brian Lutz argued that the biggest threat AI poses is not plagiarism but the erosion of the learning process itself. Lutz pushes against the idea that AI is one singular fixed thing in education. 

“There is a mistake in imagining AI is monolithic or that it can be used singularly. I’m glad this conversation is focused on its role in education, but that is very different from its role in the rest of the world. Our job as educators is to make sure that you actually walk away having learned something. That is not the same thing as asking whether or not it is a valuable tool. When calculators became easy and universal, we had to switch how we taught math, because the goal is to teach people—not have a tool do the work for them.”

He added, “Our job as educators is to make sure that you walk away having learned something.”

Lutz said generative AI has already changed student behavior in ways that undermine that mission.

“What happens with a lot of users of ChatGPT is it writes their whole essay for them,” he explained. “We know study after study that if you don’t write, you don’t learn; you don’t retain things.”

He highlighted research showing that information learned only for a test quickly disappears — and AI accelerates that problem.

Despite many concerns, Drolet sees value in AI’s  ability to provide starting points.

“It could really be an amazing tool to help you find things in a lot of different and new places… to help you gather ideas… bring different points of view… give you a couple of sources that you then go investigate yourself,” she said. But none of that replaces the need for verification and credibility.

Faculty: Learning Is at Risk if AI Writes for Students

Lutz said he has seen a dramatic rise in students turning to ChatGPT to write full essays — and he warned the consequences are serious.

“We know… study after study… that if you don’t write, you don’t learn… you don’t retain things,” he said. “Some things that are definitely already disappearing are creativity… and that matters in all fields.”

Lutz said the goal of education is not simply to produce a product, but to develop thinking.

“When we use it to do things like think through something, we have it write something for us, and then other people use it to summarize that writing… what we’ve done is taken away everything of value from the process,” he said.

He described his biggest fear: over time, students may lose the ability to think through complex tasks altogether.

“If one AI is creating something, and another AI is telling us because we’re too stupid to understand the first AI how to think about it, we put ourselves in some actual dangerous places,” he said.

Misuse Is Easy to Spot: “You’re Not Slick.”

Panelists shared several examples of students being caught using AI improperly.

Drolet recalled grading a reflection where a student outsourced a simple prompt:

“Instead of the student saying, I like to play football, it was literally the most convoluted, ‘My family and I partake in the grand American pastime of the playing of the football.’”

Writing Center tutor, Charlie Roller said it’s increasingly common for students to bring in personal essays that clearly weren’t written by them. She explained that it’s easy to tell when a student has used AI to describe something from their own life — something that should be the easiest kind of assignment to write.

“Multiple times I will get students that will come in and it’s a personalized essay and I’m like ‘girl you did not write this,’ and then they’re like ‘yeah but I just like didn’t feel like it,’ and I’m like why are you asking ChatGPT to write about a personal experience when this is just a robot in a computer in a factory? It should be the easiest of things to write since you experienced it as a human being.”

“You’re not slick,” said Roller, describing the mismatch is between a student’s spoken voice and the AI-generated prose in their paper.

Can AI be Good?

Even though many students utilize AI in potentially harmful ways within education, AI can be used to help.

As an accessibility advocate, one student, Hailey Cylinder explained how long-standing AI tools support people with disabilities.

“So I have dysgraphia which is the writing version of dyslexia. Not a lot of people realize that there’s more than just dyslexia. So, I’ve used AI a lot. However, I haven’t been using generative AI. I’ve been using the assistive AI. And a lot of people don’t realize AI has been around for a really long time. Voice detects, that’s AI. Spell check, that’s AI. A lot of stuff is AI has kind of been here for a while, but it’s just now entering the conversation because of the generative AI, ChatGPT, deep fakes, and all of that.”

Hailey reminds us that even if we may not know it, we use AI everyday. From voice to text, to scrolling through our ‘for you pages’, AI is everywhere. But now, it’s becoming something that cannot be ignored. 

But right now, it’s not about hating the usage of AI, but learning how to use it correctly and responsibly.

The Path Forward: Teaching AI Literacy

Drolet said her goal, and the task force’s priority, is to help students evaluate AI the way they evaluate information.

“If you’re going to be using one, how do you identify what this AI is? How do you know how it works? What are its limitations? What are its benefits?” she said.

She offered her overarching philosophy in simple terms:

“Anything that replaces it is no good. Anything that assists or helps in some way is good.”

As DelVal prepares new policies, she emphasized that AI is neither going away nor inherently harmful,but it must be used thoughtfully.

“We can’t just go back, but we can understand how it benefits us, how it challenges us, and how we move forward,” Drolet said.