A study of 372,793 college application essays found that after ChatGPT became available, student writing became more lexically diverse while the underlying ideas became more uniform. The researchers call this "disjunctive homogenization." The New York Times published these findings as evidence that AI constricts creative thinking.

This episode examines the op-ed "Stop Blaming AI for What the Education System Abandoned" by Basil C. Puglisi, MPA. The article argues the data is sound, but the blame is wrong. AI did not homogenize student thinking. Unstructured deployment without method governance did. The education system that has required "show your work" for generations deployed AI to millions of students without structured protocols, metacognitive checkpoints, or outcome measurement, then measured the results and blamed the tool.

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