“But it’s supposed to be hard work”: rethinking effort and legitimate academic work in the age of generative AI

Generative AI has disrupted longstanding assumptions about the relationships among effort, learning, and legitimate academic work. Its rapid proliferation has also occurred amid unprecedented convergence of institutional precarity, student needs, generational distrust, and concerns about academic integrity. Although generative AI presents genuine ethical and pedagogical risks, this essay considers whether some responses to its use may also reflect the moral value academia places on effort itself. More specifically, AI unbundles what was long assumed to be intertwined processes of effort, commitment, competence, and value. Drawing on the Protestant Work Ethic and related beliefs linking hard work with merit and legitimate achievement, I argue that reducing the effort required to perform academic work does not necessarily make that work less legitimate. At the same time, effort remains critical when the processes it requires are themselves necessary for learning and developing expertise. Evaluating AI-assisted academic work therefore requires distinguishing the effort needed to develop expertise from that needed to exercise expertise once developed. The relevant boundary is not simply whether AI was used or how much effort it displaced, but whether its use supports or supplants the development or demonstration of expertise.