“They Answer the Questions, When the Goal is to Ask Better Ones”: AI Dependency and the Crisis of Literary Education among Undergraduate Literature Students in Pakistan

Abstract

AI dependency has significantly changed the ways students engage with academic work, especially in the discipline of literature that deeply depends upon close reading and interpretation. This study investigates to what extent literature students use AI and for what purpose, focusing on the impact of AI on critical thinking, reading habits, and creative expression. Using a mixed-method questionnaire administered to 51 undergraduate literature students from 6th and 8th semesters, the study finds that 78.4% of students use AI tools daily or several times a week, and 27.5% rely solely on AI summaries and never read original texts; they open ChatGPT before a book. Students acknowledge that AI has weakened their independent critical voice and made their writing more generic. Grounded in Paulo Freire’s banking model of education and Roland Barthes’s conception of the active reader, the study argues that AI dependency does not simply enable academic dishonesty; it systematically dismantles the intellectual and creative formation that literary education is designed to produce.