Under studio lights, a small circle of teachers and students in Jubilee’s viral episode “Is AI Destroying Education?” took turns reading short passages, guessing whether they came from humans or from AI. Their reactions (confident chuckles, uncertain pauses, the occasional gasp) spoke volumes. When the GPTZero verdicts flashed on the screen, the laughter that followed wasn’t relief; it was the uneasy sound of a generation realizing that the ground beneath learning is shifting.
Across the country, classrooms have become quiet battlegrounds. Teachers describe the tension of not knowing whether the essays they grade are real or synthetic. Forty percent of students’ essays show signs of AI, one Los Angeles teacher told 404 Media. A Philadelphia teacher said students “go on mute” during Zoom class to feed questions into chatbots, returning seconds later with eerily polished answers. It’s like teaching to a ventriloquist dummy.
There’s evidence that overreliance on AI dulls critical thinking, what researchers call cognitive offloading. A Microsoft-Carnegie Mellon survey found that when users express high confidence in AI tools, they tend to report doing less critical thinking, essentially letting the tool handle more of the reasoning work.
A 2024 Pew survey found that one in four U.S. teachers believe AI tools do more harm than good in K-12 education, while a majority still see potential benefits if used transparently and with clear guardrails. Another national study by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation reported that 60% of teachers who regularly use AI say it helps them save time and improve their work quality, evidence that optimism and unease now coexist in the same classroom.
The comment section beneath the Jubilee video captures the same unease. One viewer wrote that every time they rely on AI for homework, they feel themselves “getting actively stupider.” Another wrote it’s “a great tool if you still guide the thinking but a crutch if you don’t.” These are ordinary voices trying to navigate extraordinary change, echoing the anxiety in classrooms everywhere.
But the real story isn’t about technology alone. It’s about trust, fatigue and identity. Teachers feel they’re competing with machines for their students’ attention. Students admit to a quiet panic, unsure what counts as their own work. The result is an emotional stalemate: teachers exhausted by suspicion; students dulled by convenience. Both sides are casualties of the same confusion.
So, is AI destroying education? Not exactly. It’s exposing the cracks that were already there, a system obsessed with speed, compliance and grades over curiosity. Students aren’t lazy; they’re efficient. They’re responding rationally to an irrational structure that rewards polish over process, speed over struggle.
When the goal of schooling is to produce instead of to ponder, AI simply perfects the game. The problem isn’t that students cheat; it’s that the design of education makes cheating feel like optimization. As one commenter noted, society now “rewards how fast you can produce results. The love for learning is gone.”
Not all classrooms are surrendering. A quiet revolution is unfolding among teachers who refuse to treat AI as an arms race. In workshops, teachers are testing ways to make AI a case study rather than a shortcut. Some ask students to use ChatGPT to draft essays, then spend the next class dissecting them line by line, debating what sounds authentic, what rings hollow, and why. The exercise turns AI from ghostwriter to mirror, helping students rediscover their own voice.
Technology doesn’t erode humanity; it reveals it. AI’s arrival should push us to rethink what counts as learning: not how quickly we can answer, but how deeply we can question. As university lecturer Nathan Schmidt told 404 Media, “ChatGPT isn’t the problem; it’s a symptom of a culture addicted to passive consumption.” The cure isn’t nostalgia. It’s rebuilding classrooms around curiosity, ethics and reflection, qualities no algorithm can automate.
The real war in education isn’t between teachers and students, it’s between automation and imagination. Between a system that mass-produces answers and one that cultivates thinkers.
AI will expose bad education, the kind that confuses memorization for mastery and compliance for curiosity. What will survive are classrooms led by teachers brave enough to ask the oldest question in learning: What does it mean to think for yourself?
Set the rules now: disclose when AI is used, assess thinking in class and teach students how to question the machine.
Shahin Hossain is a general fellow researching artificial intelligence and education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Department of Education.
