by datahack | 2025-05-27 01:48:06+00:00
There is a tremendous lack of understandings between the genx and millennial teachers and the way they see and use AI, and how younger people are using it.

Kids use AI like an operating system, seamlessly integrated into their workflows, their thinking, their lives. It’s not a tool they pick up and put down; it’s the environment they navigate, as natural as air. To them, AI isn’t cheating—it’s just how you get things done in a world that’s always been wired, always been instant. They do not make major life decisions without consulting their systems. They use them like therapists. It’s is far more than a Google replacement or a writing tool already.

This author’s fixation on “desirable difficulty” feels like a sermon from a bygone era, steeped in romanticized notions of struggle as the only path to growth. It’s yet another “you can’t use a calculator because you won’t always have one” — the same tired dogma that once insisted pen-and-paper arithmetic was the pinnacle of intellectual rigor (even after calculators arrived: they have in fact always been with us every day since).

The Butlerian Jihad metaphor is clever but deeply misguided casting AI as some profane mimicry of the human mind ignores how it’s already reshaping cognition, not replacing it.

The author laments students bypassing the grind of traditional learning, but what if that grind isn’t the sacred rite they think it is? What if “desirable difficulty” is just a fetishized relic of an agrarian education system designed to churn out obedient workers, not creative thinkers?

The reality is, AI’s not going away, and clutching pearls about its “grotesque” nature won’t change that. Full stop.

Students aren’t “cheating” when they use it… they’re adapting to a world where information is abundant and synthesis is king. The author’s horror at AI-generated essays misses the point: the problem isn’t the tech, it’s the assignments (and maybe your entire approach).

If a chatbot can ace your rhetorical analysis, maybe the task itself is outdated, testing rote skills instead of real creativity or critical thinking.

Why are we still grading students on formulaic outputs when AI can do that faster?

The classroom should be a lab for experimentation, not a shrine to 19th century pedagogy, which is most definitely is. I was recently lectured by a teacher about how he tries to make every one of his students a mathematician, and became enraged when I gently asked him how he’s dealing with the disruption to mathematicians as a profession that AI systems are currently doing. There is an adversarial response underneath a lot of teacher’s thin veneers of “dealing with the problem of AI” that is just wrong and such a cope.

That obvious projection leads directly to this “adversarial” grading dynamic. The author’s chasing a ghost, trying to police AI use with Google Docs surveillance or handwritten assignments. That’s not teaching. What it is standing in the way of civilization Al progress because it doesn’t fit your ideas. I know there are a lot of passionate teachers out there, and some even get it, but most definitely do not.

Kids will find workarounds, just like they always have, because they’re not the problem; the system is. If students feel compelled to “cheat” with AI, it’s because the stakes (GPAs, scholarships, future prospects) are so punishingly high that efficiency becomes survival.

Instead of vilifying them, why not redesign assessments to reward originality, process, and collaboration over polished products? AI could be a partner in that, not an enemy.

The author’s call for a return to pen and paper feels like surrender dressed up as principle and it’s rediculously out of touch.

It’s not about fostering “humanity” in the classroom; it’s about clinging to a nostalgic ideal of education that never served everyone equally anyway.

Meanwhile, students are already living in the future, where AI is as foundational as electricity.

The real challenge isn’t banning the “likeness bots” but teaching kids how to wield them critically, ethically, and creatively.

Change isn’t coming. It is already here. Resisting it won’t make us more human; it’ll just leave us behind.

Edit: sorry for so many edits. Many typos.