The Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence

Every school system in America is scrambling to develop some kind of AI policy—some legislative package intended to govern the appropriate use of the long-rumored and much-anticipated technology that's here now in a very real way.

And as is par for the course, systems seek systemic responses, the kind that can be quantified and tracked so the systems can retain its executive authority. After all, systems are gonna system....

This, however, isn't primarily a time for policies as much as it's an occasion for principles. Here's mine:

The responsible use of artificial intelligence is to extend human intelligence. The reckless use of artificial intelligence is to replace human judgment.

That single distinction has become my touchstone for thinking about AI in education.

Artificial intelligence is most appropriately and effectively employed when it extends what our human minds are naturally able to do. It has a different brand of stamina. It can retrieve information faster than we can. It can reveal patterns we might have overlooked. It can help us make summaries and find connections across enormous bodies of knowledge.

In other words, AI extends our capacity for thinking. But I want to be more precise about what I mean by extend.

One of the greatest limitations on human thinking isn't intelligence—it's our neurobiology. We get tired. We forget. We succumb to stress and frustration that stifles our cogntive momentum. And there's so much information... We simply can't access every piece of knowledge that might be relevant to the problem in front of us.

AI, however, has a different kind of capacity. It pushes beyond many of those limitations. It extends our reach. It extends the bandwidth of our thinking. It extends our potential for pattern recognition and association.

AI-powered tools can now retrieve, synthesize, organize, and connect information at a speed that would have been hard to imagine just a generation ago. Let's not hate on that... It's a remarkable extension of human intelligence.

But extension is fundamentally different from replacement.

Human intelligence isn't simply the ability to retrieve information or recognize patterns. Those matter, but they don't even come close to telling the whole story.

Human intelligence is grounded in experience and shaped by emotion, and it develops through reflection. Have you ever thought about something a day later than when it first registered in your consciousness? And you processed it differently? What about when you return to that same thinking a week, or a month, or a year, or decades later? Do you see it the same way as you did initially? It's unlikely that you did which doesn't mean that you necessarily changed your original position entirely, but with the passing of time, there's a different depth, a new fabric, some added context available for understanding.

Experience and emotion change the way we think, what we notice, what we value, and how we interpret what we know. The facts may not have changed. The human has.

That isn't a weakness of human intelligence. It's a defining strength and a key to our evolution as a species—and judgment emerges from that process.

Judgment is what happens when perception, emotion, ethics, experience, and understanding all come together. It's the distinctly human act of making a determination of what matters, what is true enough to act upon, and what ought to happen next given our role and responsibilities in the larger context of both our individual and shared humanity.

Two teachers can possess exactly the same information and arrive at different judgments—not because one is more intelligent than the other, but because each brings a different history of experience, different emotional understandings, and different ethical commitments into the act of thinking.

No large language model possesses that.

Artificial intelligence can recognize patterns.

It can predict.

It can generate.

But it can't accumulate embodied, lived, human experience.

It can't feel.

It can't care.

It's fundamentally incapable of exercising judgment in the deeply human sense of the word.

That's why every time we allow AI to make a judgment that belongs to us, we surrender part of the very capacity education is meant to cultivate in our students.

It's tricky, though. We teachers have to protect the humanity of our judgment without resorting to compromising positions that deny the potential power of the AI technologies available to us.

Students shouldn't use AI to avoid thinking.

Teachers shouldn't use AI to avoid judging.

Those aren't efficiencies.

They're abdications.

The purpose of education has never been simply to produce correct answers. Rather, it's always been to cultivate human beings capable of making wise judgments. Perhaps, then, the most important question isn't whether artificial intelligence will someday become capable of what cognitive scientists call AGI—an artificial general, common-sense, intelligence. The more important question is whether we will remain committed to cultivating the distinctly human intelligence that no machine (currently) possesses.

Teachers occupy an especially important place in this conversation because our work has never been merely about transmitting information. (I'm so sorry for you if you've been operating under that misconception because you're missing out on all the fun!) Our work is to cultivate the humanity of our students.

If school is seen as nothing more than a place where AI helps students produce correct answers more efficiently, we will have misunderstood the purpose of education altogether, and worse‚the institution of school will have lost its moral justification. We may produce answers, but we'll fail to cultivate judgment. We may create capable users of technology while neglecting the development of thoughtful, discerning people who are deeply in touch with their own humanity. We all lose if we lose the connection to what it means to be human.

So if we're looking for a principle rather than another policy, here's one I judge as worthy in carrying forward for reflection and consideration:

The responsible use of artificial intelligence is to extend human intelligence.

The reckless use of artificial intelligence is to replace human judgment.

Dr. Yemi