Changing Times

Imagine a school day when a young learner’s most important task is to decide what orders to provide their artificial intelligence assistant so that reading, writing, and problem-solving assignments are completed satisfactorily – as assessed by their adult learning leader’s artificial intelligence assistant.

This possibility is no longer in our distant future. It’s present and real right now.

Lila Shroff, a staff writer at The Atlantic, addresses the question “Is Schoolwork Optional Now?” in a recent article posted last week:

“William Liu is grateful that he finished high school when he did. If the latest AI tools had been around then, he told me, he might have been tempted to use them to do his homework. Liu, now a sophomore at Stanford, finished high school all the way back in 2024. ‘I have a younger sibling who is just graduating high school,’ he said. ‘Our educational experience has been vastly different, even though we’re just two years apart.’”

“By the time Liu graduated, ChatGPT was already causing chaos in the classroom. But the automation of school is intensifying. If at first teachers worried about students using chatbots to write essays, now new agentic tools such as Claude Code are allowing students to outsource even more of their work to the machines. Need to take an online math quiz? Write a biology-lab report? Create a PowerPoint presentation for history class? AI can do all of this and more. One high schooler recently told me that he struggles to think of a single assignment that AI wouldn’t be able to do for him.”

“As a measure of just how good AI has become at schoolwork, consider a new bot called Einstein. Several weeks ago, the tool went viral with big claims: ‘Einstein checks for new assignments and knocks them out before the deadline,’ a website advertising the bot explained. All that a student had to do was hand over their credentials for Canvas, the popular learning-management platform, and Einstein promised to do the rest. No matter the task, the bot was game: Einstein boasted that it could watch lectures, complete readings, write papers, participate in discussion forums, automatically submit homework assignments. If a quiz or a final exam was administered online, Einstein was happy to do that too.”

“Einstein was designed to provoke. Its creator, Advait Paliwal, a 22-year-old tech entrepreneur, told me that he’d released the bot as a way of alerting educators as to just how good AI is at schoolwork. ‘You can blame me,’ he said. ‘But this is happening right now, and more people need to know about what’s to come.’ (He previously said that he designed Einstein’s landing page by prompting AI to make a website ‘that people would get angry over.’) Almost immediately after releasing Einstein, Paliwal started receiving emails from professors chastising him for creating a tool seemingly designed to perpetuate academic fraud. He took down the bot after he received multiple cease-and-desist letters, including one from Canvas’s parent company.”

“To Paliwal, the backlash missed the point: ‘If I didn’t post about this, someone would have used the same technology and hidden it from the professors,’ he said. ‘It’s actually better that they know that this exists, and they can correctly prepare for what’s to come.’ The tool also, of course, gave Paliwal a moment of viral fame. Nevertheless, Einstein does seem to be an indicator of where AI in the classroom is headed. The latest bots have massive context windows, meaning that students can feed in mountains of course content such as syllabi, lecture slides, and practice exams. Today’s agentic tools can complete all kinds of tasks, such as participating in online discussion forums and taking notes on recorded lectures without student intervention. According to one analysis, the percentage of students middle-school age or older who self-reported using AI for help with homework climbed by 14 points from May to December of last year.”

“Amid all of this, Silicon Valley is doubling down on its push to integrate AI into schools. In the lead-up to final exams last spring, nearly every major AI firm offered college students free (or heavily discounted) access to their paid chatbots. Now the tech industry is offering students cheap access to their agentic tools. Last summer, Anthropic announced ‘Claude Builder Clubs’ – an initiative in which student paid by the AI company host workshops and hackathons on their campuses. In exchange for membership in those clubs, students are given free access to Claude Code. A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced that it would be offering college students $100 worth of credits for Codex, its agentic coding tool.”

“Instructors…are also using plenty of AI. Canvas recently introduced a new AI teaching agent designed to save instructors time on ‘low educational value tasks’ such as organizing online-course modules and adjusting assignment due dates. ‘Faculty are using AI tools both for instructional purposes, for building course materials, but they’re also starting to play around with generative AI to actually grade and assess the learning,’ Marc Watkins, a researcher at the University of Mississippi who studies AI and education, told me….”

“Some educators are worried about ‘a fully automated loop’ – as the Modern Language Association put it last fall – in which AI-generated assignments are completed and graded by AI agents. Instructors have taken to analyzing students’ Google Docs history to make sure they are typing responses live instead of pasting in text from a bot. But of course, an AI work-around exists for that too: A new suite of human-typing simulators promises to generate text to make it look as if a student is writing in real time when, really, the work is being done by AI.”

It’s safe to say that we are moving through a transformational learning experience not unlike what happened when agrarian society shifted to an urban, industrial one. Instead of learning at home or inside a one-room schoolhouse, young learners started to attend schools that modeled themselves after industrial factories – a regimented start and stop time, bells to signal when kids moved from class to class, young learners sitting in row order with the teacher at the head of the class. Instead of sitting beside older kids (who may or may not be your brother or sister), students were separated and sorted into age-based classrooms and were graded based upon their age instead of their ability. Teacher training increased, so much so that teaching earned a professional status. Compulsory education became the law in most if not all states.

These teaching and learning changes, happening while the country became less agricultural and more urban and industrial, were considered life-changing by the prognosticators of the day, not unlike what is happening now with the rapid and significant impact of artificial intelligence on how all of us are learning, and will learn in the future.

“For the times they are a-changin.” – Bob Dylan

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB