Aren't I clever for that title?
In the age of AI we as a society have been thrust into, it's hard to avoid it. On my drive to and from work I see billboards about AI, I get ads everywhere about Google Gemini, and most disappointing of all My AI Girlfriend ads are all over the place and that's how I found out my AI girlfriend was cheating on me.
AI integration is everywhere, and unfortunately, the train has left the station and it doesn't really feel bad for you that you've been left behind. It wasn't slow, it was all at once, and now we're here and the only thing we can do about it is reluctantly adapt to these changes. Trust me, I don't like it either, but I have to agree with the sentiment that teaching AI is like teaching Sex-ed, you can't just close your eyes and flail your arms about trying to get it to go away. Zach Teitel, the author of "Teaching AI: It's Just Sex-ed" puts it best saying, "The better approach - the responsible approach - is education grounded in critical literacy and humanistic values. Not to moralize. Not to control. But to prepare," (Teitel, 2025). If you tell teens in Sex-ed to never have sex until marriage or something similar and then call it a day, you're going to end up with STD's and unwanted pregnancies that are all immensely hard to deal with. Turning a blind eye to AI and just banning it entirely in a classroom is somewhat ignorant, you have to look forwards, not shelter in place.
But enough of the analogies, it's time to ask ourselves where AI can be used then, if we were to integrate it into learning? Even now, I still don't think it's very much at all. AI gets things incorrect A LOT, especially with summaries and pulling quotes from articles, so the best way to teach it is like teaching how to research on JSTOR. Here's how you prompt it for the best results if you are going to use it, and here's how to identify if a response is totally stupid and insane. You can use it to perhaps check the grammar on your paper in a basic sense, or maybe in a research paper to quickly find articles. I'll use a real example, I used AI to help with a paper once where I needed to find 10 examples of coming-of-age books that related to my point. I could spend a while looking into this, which isn't even the main point of my paper, or I could ask AI to find 10 examples, then I fact check it and see if it actually gave me a correct answer, and move on with writing the content of the paper that matters so much more. I spent more time on learning how to write the paper, rather than spending that time on trying to find examples I needed to use to check a box. There's this article that talks about how you can integrate AI into the classroom, and I disagree with it in generating actual classroom content, but the idea of generating essays to show them what not to do actually seems like a pretty good idea. Then there's Ruth Li's article "Cyborg Composing with AI" about hybrid writing with AI that demonstrates that with an AI generated poem and I just do not agree. AI writing and human writing are incompatible. You cannot merge the two, they're two different blood types, AI does not understand why there are line breaks in poems. I don't really think that will work, writing is an art, and art is inherently human. You can use AI to guide the writing process, but you cannot supplement it. You look to a dictionary for words you're trying to find to sound more eloquent and smart in your writing, but you don't look for a whole paragraph. AI is a gentle nudge in the right direction, not holding your hand to show you how to cross the street.
If you are going to use AI, take the path where you still learn from the process.
Learning isn't about what you've made, it's not the 4, it's the 2 + 2. It's how you figured it out, it's the process of doing. It's the, "and why did you think 4 was the answer?" Learning is living, your brain is processing new information every day and it's constantly creating new pathways of information so you can recall how you yourself optimized it. It's lesson 5, the shortest route is the detour. Learning can only be done by the person, it cannot be done for you by AI. It can't write for you because you didn't do any work. And sure, if you want to get into semantics and technicality, then yes, technicallyyyyyyyyy you did the work to prompt the AI to write the paper, but let me ask you this, did you do any real work pressing "Big Mac" at the big ol' self-ordering screens at McDonald's? No, you did not prepare an unforgettable luncheon, you're not delightfully devilish, just because you purchased fast food you did not pass it off as your own cooking.
And look, I get it, some students that walk into your classroom DO NOT CARE about English or writing or reading comprehension, and that's totally fine. I didn't care for high school math or science, but I really cared about English, and that's why I'm here. They're going to want to take the shortest possible route because they don't care, and to an extent, I can understand that. I was in the same position not too long ago and I can't say with 100% confidence that I would not have used AI so I could spend more time on my hobbies and less time on homework. People would pass around ways to effectively do that in math class, I remember something like "MathScan" being the hit new thing, you'd take a picture of your math homework and it would just do it all for you. I just use all this as motivation to be a better teacher so I can prove to my students that my work I'm giving them is worth their time, it's worth their effort. I see AI as a challenge, a challenge to be better, and I invite everyone to not reject the motions already set in place, but to instead learn how to surf, because after all, surfers are cool as hell.
