The AI Reckoning in Education

The future of learning doesn't require buying into AI hype or beating the machine; what students need is a greater dose of humanity.

Growing up in the 2000s, math teachers used to warn us: “You won’t always have a calculator in your pocket.” That was naive!

And yet, many educators’ first instinct when AI entered the classroom in 2023 was to ban it. To install detection software. To brand students as cheaters if they used it. But why?

We know students will always have access to this tech; just like we all had access to Google, Wikipedia, Quora, and calculators. The question isn’t, “How do we stop students from using AI?” (so we can keep teaching the same way), but rather, “What kind of education makes sense now?”

Yet when AI evangelists share articles on “The Importance of Teaching AI”, I roll my eyes. We’re not facing a crisis of AI illiteracy. What students need most from educators is a greater dose of humanity.

AI is a Reckoning

Are schools supposed to be factories where we churn out obedient little worker bees? Or should we seek to mentor curious, thoughtful, and empowered young adults?

Advancing AI is a reckoning that will force educators to settle that age old debate once and for all.

When education is reduced to rote memorization, menial work, and standardized formats, it becomes ripe for automation. That’s not AI’s fault!

If you studied Computer Science in school, you may look back fondly on making your first pong game, timer app, UI for a calculator program, etc. Perhaps you even enjoyed the challenge of doing advanced problems on LeetCode.

Nowadays, AI could do it all in seconds, so why bother?

Thus, is AI destined to make people unprecedentedly lazy and stupid? I hope not!

The AI Slop Epidemic

Throughout 2024 and early 2025, an epidemic of AI imagery, “slop”, poisoned the internet. Educational websites were sadly not immune. Even a bajillion dollar corporation like Microsoft has no shame!

Sure this MakeCode Arcade Educator banner image looks “good enough” at a glance, but take a closer look.

What the hell is this?!

This “pixel art” is prominently featured on a site used by thousands of students everyday. Surely some of them will notice! So what message does it send?

“This shit’s not even mid but they still got the bag tho?! AI ‘bout to be OP for homework.”

Translation: “This image required almost zero effort to produce and looks awful, yet it was approved of and published by well-paid employees at Microsoft?! Henceforth I’ll use AI to do my homework.”

The phrase, “Perfect is the enemy of good”, implies perfection is eternally out of reach, so at some point you have to decide your work is good enough: otherwise you’ll never get stuff done. But “good enough” becomes the enemy of humanity when quality is sacrificed.

Clearly Microsoft’s issue isn't the cost of paying an artist.

This soulless, ugly mishmash of pixels, was far from a uniquely bad use of AI either. It was shocking to find out how many people couldn’t tell, or didn’t care to notice, what makes good visual art and writing so different from the slop.

(I too wanted art I could use for free on the p5play Learn pages, so I found assets from Kenny’s All-in-One Collection that inspire students.)

No More Slop?

Yet with better models, particularly ChatGPT 4o (which became free to use with daily limits in March 2025), it’s no longer realistic to disregard AI imagery as mere “slop”.

Most people are using this tech to produce imagery they’d never ask, or could afford to pay, a human artist to create. Yet, these tools are also doing what they’re designed to do: funnel money to big tech that used to go to human artists.

So the debate surrounding AI has largely turned into a war between pro-AI and anti-AI zealots. Did AI “learn” from human writers, artists, filmmakers, etc. or steal from them? Is the job loss faced by programmers and graphic designers, like the blacksmiths and paper boys of yore, just the inevitable cost of progress or the beginning of the end for humanity?

Among teachers the battle is fierce. Yet, students seem to have unanimously embraced AI. Why?

Gaming the System

Before this next section, I want to stress the importance of taking personal responsibility for one’s own education. There’s agency in deciding, in spite of a flawed system, to earnestly engage (which I often did). Of course, doing things outside your comfort zone builds character too.

“Cheaters only cheat themselves.” That can certainly be true!

Yet rampant AI use among students ought to be the final nail in the coffin of education systems that prioritize grades over real learning and effort.

Teaching to the Bottom

Not that long ago I was a student too: a child of the “No Child Left Behind” Bush era of education in the US.

I loved learning… but hated school.

I was a “gifted and talented” student, top of the class in Math, yet melodramatically referred to my elementary school as a prison. Teachers taught at an excruciatingly slow pace and even had the audacity to oblige me to spend hours of my free time in my own home doing menial proof-of-learning assessments.

The push to cater lessons to the bottom of the class (to raise standardized test averages), ironically made kids like me feel left behind.

At 10 years old, I felt oppressed by the monotony of the daily routine imposed on me by my captors. Thus, I became quite a troublemaker: talking to girls in class, blatantly sleeping on my desk, doing arts and crafts— anything to avoid utter boredom during the hours I was forced to sit at a desk in a concrete bricked cell with fluorescent lighting. I got sent to the principal’s office so often and every time I’d just start crying out of guilt. I knew my teachers were good, friendly people… it was the system that antagonized us.

So I learned to game the system to recover my precious free time.

Freshman year of high school, I started essentially home schooling myself during school hours. In Algebra II I’d teach myself a chapter during corrections, finish the nightly homework during the lecture, and then tutor the prettiest girl in school during in-class homework time. I sacrificed lunch hours to do my other homework in the library, so when I was released home I could play video games.

Burn Out

But this was unsustainable. By junior year I had double the homework, great friends, water polo, a piano, Halo 4, and of the highest priority, a girlfriend. Now I loved going to school, but my apathy towards the workload was at a record high.

It seemed like everyone “with a life” started cutting corners or outright cheating just to get by. Friends took turns doing each other’s homework. If a class was taught statewide or nationwide using the same textbook, answers were available online. If there was a test that one cohort of students took before the rest, they’d relay the questions they remembered. Some students had older siblings that gifted them years of completed homework and tests.

In the past, I thought I was smarter than everyone else, so I wanted As to externally validate my ego. When I got burnt out and took that pressure off, I began to enjoy the best years of my youth.

My senior year, in the limbo before college, I adopted a ridiculous new strategy: ace every third test and nearly fail the rest. “What’s the homework in Calculus?” Ask me next month when I start doing it again. I spent class time coding on my computer, oblivious to my surroundings, and passed with my first C.

AI as a School Survival Guide

Of course, my story is atypical of students who struggle in school for far worse reasons. For students dealing with learning disabilities, trauma, poverty, or even just a lack of support at home, “gaming the system” isn’t a form of teenage rebellion—it’s survival.

Disengagement isn’t always a sign of apathy. It can be the rational response to years of frustration, shame, and being made to feel incapable or invisible. And in that context, AI doesn’t just offer convenience—it offers relief. Relief from feeling behind. Relief from the anxiety of being called on. Relief from the burden of proving you’re enough in a system that’s never reflected your strengths.

So when we talk about students cheating with AI, we can’t reduce it to just laziness or bad morals. We have to ask what conditions make cheating feel like the best or only option.

The Value of Education

While my early school years instilled skepticism towards the systems that govern our lives and an irreverence for authority, in college it became apparent that getting an education is a privilege and the point is to construct the best version of oneself.

In my small “Writing the Essay” course filled with English majors, my inability to craft even remotely compelling prose was a source of embarrassment during peer review sessions. I could no longer anonymously format some trite bullshit into a five paragraph essay. I was shocked to find myself engaged in the pursuit of optimal sentence structures and vocabulary use.

If I had never been meaningfully challenged at NYU, would I have still discovered my passion for language arts and teaching?

The Threat of AI

So much hype around AI is pure marketing jingoism, lies pushed by big tech for their own financial benefit. Still, this is what concerns me most: AI’s contribution to the crisis of motivation facing humanity. Think of all the personal growth that’ll fail to occur because “AI can do it” or worse, the idea that “AI will do it”.

If education is meant to help us reach our potential, then letting AI do the hard parts for us, before we’ve even tried, is a recipe for a future filled with people who’ve never even met themselves.

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What can teachers do to help students succeed in the AI era?

This is a huge topic, so I’m writing a follow-up article. Part 2 coming soon!