John Gallagher: “Students still think they write better than the machines: A study of undergrad self-perceptions of Generative AI and writing skills”

Since ChatGPT arrived, surveys suggest that 86% of students use GenAI in their academic work. But what do students really think about these tools, and about their own writing? In this talk, I share findings from a large-scale survey (n=342) of University of Illinois undergraduates conducted in spring 2026. These students occupy a unique moment in history: they learned to write before GenAI existed, which makes them well positioned to compare their own abilities to a machine’s. The results may surprise you. Students report high familiarity with AI but lukewarm trust. Nearly half of humanities students say they never use these tools at all, while business and STEM students use and trust them the most. When asked to compare their writing to GenAI, students overwhelmingly judged their own work superior, insisting that their ideas are better. Along the way, speaker John Gallagher discusses research that shows GenAI erodes writing ability over time by making us less persistent. Whether you use AI every day, avoid it entirely, or simply wonder what it means for how we write and think, this conversation is for you. This talk is part of WRAP‘s series on AI and writing, supported by a SHASS MITHIC grant. John Gallagher is a Professor of English and Faculty Affiliate at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he researches AI writing, social media habits, and methods that combine qualitative and quantitative techniques. He is the author of four books, including AI Though the Experts’ Eyes, available from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. In addition to student use of GenAI, his current projects include studies of participation inequality in online communities (a select few actually participate online) with implications for LLM training data.