By Hfsa Fahad

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Welcome to the future: your revision buddy can now type back.

It doesn't yawn. It doesn't tire. It doesn't complain about back-to-back clinics or the constant screech of suction.

Ask it a question and it answers - a genie, swift and polished, right in your pocket. Ask any sci-fi fan and they'll tell you: this is not the AI they grew up picturing. Where are the glowing terminals and whispered nuclear codes? AI was supposed to patch the net after a cyber-war, not debate with you about whether you should revise today or tomorrow – or worse, explain how to cram for an exam you've ignored for two weeks.

In the age of generative AI, dental students have gained a classmate who never forgets their notes, never misses a lecture, and never fails to reply. It'll happily outline your essay due in three hours, ‘invent' a mnemonic and generate an apologetic email to your tutor on a Monday morning. It has the ‘ability' to do all this and more before you sit down and pick up a pen.

And yet, beneath the sleek veneer lies a problem: what happens when we let a tool start doing the thinking for us - when we outsource the very skills that got us here?

The lure is obvious. At midnight, when caffeine has stopped working and your flatmate has abandoned the library for bed, AI feels like salvation. It can reduce the intricacies of head and neck anatomy into neat diagrams, generate flashcards on periodontal indices, and even create a mock viva question to test you. It is the dream study partner: endlessly patient, always available, and never once asking to borrow your highlighters.

But dreams can sour. Generative AI is less a mentor and more a smooth-talking salesman: polished, persuasive, but you'd better read the small print before you buy what it's selling. Its polished prose masks shaky foundations, and hallucinates with certainty1 – confidently relocating a nerve, misquoting a statistic, or inventing a DOI that does not exist.2 Its use, unacknowledged, can nudge us across the blurry line between resourcefulness and plagiarism.

Beyond accuracy, there are other ethical shadows. Relying on AI to draft essays without disclosure risks veering into misconduct. Submitting AI-generated reflections strips them of their very essence: struggle, insight, and growth. Even when used ‘just for notes,' the temptation to outsource thinking is real. And dentistry, more than most disciplines, cannot afford clinicians who can parrot but not reason.

This author is certainly no fan of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini or the newest iteration of data scalpers cropping up – but they are a fan of being able to get things done on time. Like it or not, most (if not all) students use gen AI for something. To pretend otherwise would be dishonest.

So how do we, the generation of digital natives, use it without losing ourselves? The same way we use our tools, useful and precise, but requiring skill and restraint.

A few thumb rules could help:

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    Verify: If you wouldn't trust a classmate's unreferenced claim about occlusion, don't trust a chatbot's either. Cross-check with textbooks, journals, or – dare I say it – your own notes (or the ones you got from the year above!)

  2. 2.

    Check policy: Many universities are now publishing guidance on AI use for students. Make sure to read and check. That said, please do not submit a graded assignment or exam written using genAI.

  3. 3.

    Disclose: If AI shaped your essay's skeleton, acknowledge it, just as you would cite any source. In academia and life in general, transparency is important.

  4. 4.

    Preserve the struggle: Spaced repetition and active recall remain gold standards for long term retention.3 This includes the painful act of trawling through your Anki, the head-scratching, the diagram-scribbling – it's all embedding the knowledge within you.4 Letting AI do that heavy lifting is like asking someone else to floss for you – you might feel fresher, but the plaque is still there.

  5. 5.

    Ask better questions: Don't just request summaries - use AI to test you, to roleplay a patient, or to help you see a topic from multiple angles. In short: use it to stretch – not shrink – your thinking.

  6. 6.

    Think sustainably: Prompts aren't free – ethically or environmentally. If you must prompt, do so sparingly – awareness is part of responsible use.5,6

And perhaps the hardest truth: AI is fast, but dentistry is slow. It can take years to perfect composite technique, or calm an anxious patience without feeling anxious yourself. No algorithm can give you that. Your wisdom grows in the pauses between each prompt typed - spilled ink, spilled tears, the discipline etched into your hand.

Generative AI is a brilliant assistant, but it should never be the author of your education. It may be tireless but to tire is to be human - and to be a dentist, one must be human. Because when you hold the mirror to a patient's smile, it will not be an algorithm speaking. It will be you: the judgement you've honed, the stories you've learned to hear, the imprint you leave.

Machines can simulate knowledge; only you can own it. Like enamel, once it is yours, it endures.