Waves of research show that wanton use of artificial intelligence by college students is making their outputs dangerously dimmer. A new paper by researchers from Georgetown University comparing 2,200 US college admission essays written before AI tools with those generated by GPT-4 showed a remarkable slide in collective creativity. At about the same time, UC Berkeley’s computer science department posted its worst failure rate ever, primarily because of what a professor called a “vast increase in academic dishonesty” through generative AI. As education is one of the most consequential fields where the wrong kind of AI use may make the difference between an able future generation and a hobbled one, Indian institutes should choose their policy on the matter with informed care.