This morning I was reading an opinion article in the Harvard Crimson proposing a policy for the use of artificial intelligence in school districts. The writer warned that the technology is developing very quickly, and that if we do not get out in front of it and limit it, it is going to get out of control—and all the intellectual benefits of modern schooling will be lost on children who grow up using these tools.
As I read the article, I began to think as a teacher. What is the worst-case scenario here? Why are schools so worried about the use of AI? If we can identify the worst case clearly, we should be able to solve the problem.
What I concluded is this: the concern of modern schools with AI is not concern for the intellectual progress of students. It is fear that artificial intelligence is going to expose the false foundation on which modern schooling has been built.
I will say that again. Modern schools are afraid that AI tools are going to expose the false foundation on which modern schools have been built. They have been allowed to get away with it for a long time, but artificial intelligence is finally revealing the flaws of modern education. If they cannot find a way to clamp down on it, they are going to be in trouble. That is what they are actually concerned about.
To demonstrate the problem, let us think through the worst-case scenario together.
The Worst-Case Scenario
Suppose I am a school teacher with thirty students in a class. I assign my students to read one of Aesop’s fables and, for homework, to write an analysis of the fable—just as we do in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.
The children go home. The strong students, the ones who love learning, read the fable and do the assignment. They write the analysis according to the instructions they were given in class, and they come to school the next day with their work finished and turn it in.
The weak students, the ones who do not like to study, do not want to learn, and do not like to read, go home and open ChatGPT. They copy the assignment instructions I gave them, paste them in, and hit submit. ChatGPT writes the analysis. They copy the text into a document and bring it to class the next day.
So we have two situations: the good students, who are interested in learning and enjoy doing their assignments, and the weak students, who really do not want to be bothered and are simply trying to avoid a failing grade for turning in nothing at all. At least they turn in something.
That is the worst-case scenario. A student does not do the assigned reading, does not do the assigned thinking, does not complete the assigned work, but turns in work produced by a generative AI system.
Grading the Papers
Now imagine I have collected all the students’ work and have the pile of papers on my desk. I begin grading, and I grade with my knowledge of the students in mind. I know Amanda is a great student. I know Michael is a great student. I know Thomas is a lazy student who hates class. I know what to expect as I read.
Amanda has written a good analysis of the fable. I give her an A. Michael has done a fine job. I give him an A. Then I come to Thomas, and I read through his assignment, and I find that it is a good analysis of the assigned fable.
What do I do as a teacher? Do I assume that Thomas cheated, or do I give him the benefit of the doubt and grade the assignment he submitted?
If I am fair, I must say that a student is innocent until proven guilty. So I read the assignment, and I grade the assignment, and I say, “This is really good work. I am going to give him an A.”
There are the results. Remember, there are twenty or thirty students in the class. Amanda, Michael, and Thomas have all received A’s on this assignment.
What is the problem here? What is the actual problem we are concerned with?
First, Amanda and Michael may be upset. They went and studied and did the assignment, and it may have taken them a couple of hours. They know Thomas did not do the assignment. They know he went home, used ChatGPT, and submitted AI-generated work. So they may be upset—though I will not say they will be, because in my experience most good students really do not care what other students are doing. But they might be upset if they found out Thomas received the same grade they did without ever reading the fable.
It seems to me that the real fear is this: bad students will get good grades. Good students will not get bad grades. But bad students will get good grades, and that is the worst-case scenario.
Why Would a School Fear That?
Why would a school be upset that weak students were getting good grades? There are a couple of answers.
First, you could have a nasty teacher who says, “I want bad students to fail. I want them to get bad grades, and I am upset that they are able to get good grades.” That is a distorted way of thinking, and yet I think many teachers do think like that.
The more respectable answer is that if children are allowed to cheat, they will not get better. They will not learn from their mistakes. They will not be challenged by the assignments, they will not do the reading, and they will not improve over time. On this account, access to AI tools ultimately hurts the child because it prevents his improvement.
I object to that response, because I think it is fake.
In a modern school, the class is not set up so that weak students get better. What exactly would the mechanism be?
Suppose Thomas went home and, instead of using ChatGPT, actually tried to read the fable. He did not really understand it, because he is not a literary person. When he tried to work through the analysis, he had no idea what to say. He did a poor job on the assignment and turned it in. He would receive a low grade—say a C or a D—for low-quality work.
But would he actually have an opportunity to improve? Would that teacher take time with Thomas to work on the assignment with him? Help him see what he did wrong? Read through the fable with him? Help him learn to read with comprehension? Help him learn to complete the analysis? Give him a chance to resubmit?
That is not going to happen in a modern school.
What actually happens is that the good students get good grades and the weak students get the low grades the teacher believes they deserve. And I can prove that this is how the school works, because the next day, or the next week, the students are not divided into those who did well and those who did poorly. The whole class simply moves on. Students are not separated into groups. Teachers do not schedule time to work with the students who did badly. The whole group moves on to the next lesson with different grades in the book. Amanda and Michael keep their A’s, Thomas keeps his C or D, and everyone proceeds to the next activity.
That is how modern schools work. Modern schools give awards to good students and bad grades to bad students.
The School as Inspection Station
If you step back and look at that, you have to ask: what, then, is the purpose of the school?
It is to sort the students of a community into good students and bad students by giving them assessments and grading their work. It is an inspection station. No one would say that is what a school should be—but that is what a modern school is. The good children get good grades, the weak children get bad grades, and the line moves along.
The reason artificial intelligence is dangerous is that it allows the weak students to get good grades. That is why people are upset.
What Would Actually Have to Change
What would need to be done to prevent this?
All attention would turn to the teacher. We would have to say: when you grade these assignments, you must be able to tell whether this is the student’s own writing. You must know your students so well, and read their work so carefully, that you can say, “Yes, this really does look like Amanda’s work. This reads like Amanda’s thinking. Yes, this is Michael’s work, and this is his thinking. But I can see that this is not Thomas’s work.”
And you cannot simply assume it. It would be wicked to penalize a student who is normally weak in class every time he does good work, on the assumption that anything good he produced must be cheating. You would have to demonstrate it. You would become a prosecuting attorney accusing students of cheating, with the entire burden of proof on you. The student could plead the Fifth. Proving the case would be very difficult, and no teacher is interested in doing that work.
The other option would be to separate students into those who do well independently and those who do poorly, and to provide the tutoring, instruction, coaching, and resubmission those weaker students need. No teacher is going to do that either—especially with thirty students in a class.
I remember my years as a private school teacher. If you totaled my classes together, I might have 125 students at a time. Grading always had to be done quickly. That is why we have Scantron exams and multiple-choice quizzes. There is so much to grade that it has to move fast. Personalized grading with individual feedback, follow-up coaching, resubmission, and regrading is simply not going to happen.
Schools will not pursue anything like that, because they are built to be grade schools, where classes of students move through together, sorted by date of birth. The whole foundation of the school is contrary to real learning. Modern schools are not designed to lead individual students to mastery. That is not what they are for. They sort and grade students.
They do not like to say that. They love to present themselves as benevolent lovers of learning who want to teach every child. But the truth of what modern schools actually do is that they sort and grade. They do not take weak students and make them strong students. They reward good students and penalize bad ones.
Artificial intelligence threatens that system, because weak students are now able to submit work so good that teachers cannot distinguish true work from false work—and if they try, they will have to prove it, which is a nightmare.
The Schools’ Solution: Ban It
So what is the schools’ solution? They want artificial intelligence banned.
The Crimson article I mentioned recommended that students not be allowed to use artificial intelligence at all: that school-issued devices have AI tools removed and blocked, that public libraries not allow students access to AI tools, that school computer labs not provide them. The opportunity must be completely prevented, because if students have it, all hell is going to break loose in these schools—and the schools know it.
Many homeschool parents, many private school parents, many Christians have already jumped on this “ban AI” bandwagon, arguing that children should not be allowed to use computers, or the internet, or artificial intelligence, because we cannot discern whether they are actually learning on their own.
My answer is that the reason you cannot discern whether they are learning on their own is that you never could, and you were never doing it in the first place. You were never working with each child to ensure that he was individually advancing toward mastery. So artificial intelligence is not a threat to that work. Artificial intelligence is exposing the reality that, for all the talk about the good that teachers do and how important schools are and where we would be without them, schools have never led individual students to mastery.
That is the actual threat posed by artificial intelligence.
The only reasonable solution is to redesign schools completely, so that we do lead individual students to mastery.
How I Eliminated Cheating in My Own Classes
I can speak from experience. Long before artificial intelligence was developed, I eliminated cheating in my classes—not by threats, but by my assignment and grading policies.
I had thought about the problem and seen what it actually was. We build high-stakes assessments in which children can have enormously significant outcomes threatened by poor performance on a single assessment, exam, or class.
I had a student who was an elite basketball player in a high school program. He already had college scholarship offers—his future was laid out in front of him, with scholarships worth fifty, sixty, eighty thousand dollars already on the table. He was a good student, roughly a 3.0 to 3.5 student, a great athlete, and a good young man from a good family. But he had a chemistry class he could not pass, and in the middle of basketball season he had a D in it.
His chemistry teacher chose to penalize him by informing the basketball coach of his struggles and insisting that he be held out of an important game—a game at which college and NBA scouts would be present. They would see this young man in street clothes because of apparent academic struggles in one class.
That boy’s whole future was made to depend on one class, and perhaps on one exam.
That is why students cheat. The demands of the class are wildly disproportionate to the student’s life and to any benefit he receives from it. Any reasoning student will conclude that it is worth taking a chance on cheating: he will probably get away with it, because the teachers are lazy, and if he does badly for the sake of honesty he will simply be punished for it. So he might as well try.
My classes worked the other way around.
There were scheduled dates for assignments, quizzes, and tests. But I told my students: “I have to turn your grades in on the last day of the marking period. Any time I give you an assignment, a quiz, or a test, you have until the last minute of that last day to retake it, resubmit it, and raise your grade. No work is final until the marking period ends.”
With that open assessment and resubmission policy, my students did not cheat.
If a student was unable to prepare an assignment, he would come and tell me. “Mr. Michael, we had a football game last night, we did not get back until 11:30, my parents took us out for dinner afterward, and I never even thought about the assignment.” Fine. You need to get it done. He would finish it over the weekend and bring it in.
You could say that is not fair to the other students. It is entirely fair. The other students were not playing for the school football team and traveling halfway across the state to represent the school. And the policy was open to everyone equally.
There were times when students thought they would take advantage of the policy, but they were only spiting themselves.
I had one other strict policy against cheating: if I so much as suspected a student of cheating during an exam, he had to come to my desk immediately and complete the rest of the exam orally.
My students never cheated. It was not because of that threat. It was because they knew there was a realistic policy for grades, and they knew I always had their best interests in mind. Because of our relationship, they did not want to disappoint me. So they studied more. They resubmitted quizzes and tests. They came in after school to retake exams. They turned in late assignments. By the end of the marking period—and by the end of the year—I had individual students who had learned a great deal of the content of those courses because of that assessment policy.
I also had parents come to conferences ready to complain about a son’s low grade. When I explained the assessment policy, the story changed quickly. “Are you telling me he could have submitted that test again at any time? Are you telling me he could have turned those assignments in at any time?” Yes. Any time until the last day of the marking period.
The students loved my policies. The parents loved my policies. My supervisors loved the enthusiasm the children had for my classes. My fellow teachers hated my policies. They wanted nothing to do with resubmissions, retesting, or late work.
Their policies were presented as strict and disciplined, but they were simply lazy on the teacher’s part—all of it artificial. And their laziness was the cause of all the trouble.
The same is true today. This AI controversy is caused by lazy teachers who offer classes that are far too easy, with assessments designed to be easy to grade—designed for the benefit of the teacher rather than the edification of the student—and with policies that are easy for the teacher and create every opportunity for cheating. And when those teachers are told that it is now their job to catch AI use, do you know what they will do? They will ignore it. They will not bother.
That is why banning AI is their only option. They must have it banned, because it exposes what a scam modern schooling is, and neither the teachers nor the administrators will do what would need to be done instead.
How This Led to the Classical Liberal Arts Academy
What developed in my classes led to my development of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.
As computer technology developed, I saw that while it would be very difficult for me as a teacher to manage the progress of every individual student and allow them to move freely through the school year, it was very easy for a database to manage each student. I did not need to micromanage anyone. I did not need the whole class to move at the same pace. I could leave the management of individual progress to the database and simply say: at the end of the marking period, everything is due; that is when I assess where everyone stands and assign grades.
I was flexible with the timeline, and I encouraged every student—the strong ones and the ones who had fallen behind—to persevere and keep working as hard as they could until the last minute of the marking period, and that things would go well for them.
What emerged was something like the old one-room schoolhouse. Every individual student was working to master the content of the course at his own pace, with only the final deadline to keep in view.
The strong students had no difficulty. They finished their assignments on time the first time, earned high scores, and were free to focus on their other courses because my requirements were already fulfilled. The struggling students benefited most, because they had second, third, and fourth chances to learn the material, understand the assignment, and walk away at the end of the marking period with good grades.
So it helped both groups. And if a strong student got ahead and was bored, he could ask, “Mr. Michael, is there something else I could do?” I would say, “Yes, there is a great deal more you could do. Let us work on it together. The class is reading five verses in Latin—why do we not read something else together, and I will write you a reference letter saying that you went above and beyond what was required.” There was an extra reward for the excellent student.
What I Would Do If I Were Teaching Today
If I were teaching in a classroom today, with artificial intelligence available, the first thing I would do is design my class with much higher standards.
I would tell my students: “Ten years ago, you would have had to do real work to earn decent grades on this content. Now you have access to so many tools that what I considered good achievement ten years ago I no longer consider good achievement. I am going to hold you to a much higher standard. Instead of five verses each class, we are going to do ten. Instead of twenty assignments, we are going to do fifty.”
I would increase the quantity of the lesson content and the assignments, and I would change how grades are calculated. Teachers write syllabi with formulas—tests 40 percent, quizzes 25 percent, assignments 10 percent, participation whatever is left over. I would say: participation is going to be 50 percent of the grade. I am going to cold call you day by day. If I call on you to answer a question or discuss a topic and you are completely unprepared, staring like a deer in the headlights, I am going to mark in my book that you were not prepared to participate. That is how we will assess your progress.
“So I encourage you to use AI. If we are studying the Battle of Lepanto in history, go home and use it. Ask it questions. Get the details. Ask about the dates and places. Look up the locations on Google Maps. Use every resource you can find. But you had better be ready in class to discuss the topic, because I am going to call on you.”
I would adapt my teaching methods, my assessment methods, and my grade calculations, and I would encourage the children to use the technology—while holding them accountable for the goal, which is that each of them master the content individually.
I can do that because I am a teacher who knows his subjects. If you are a teacher who lives by the answer keys—a C student who barely got through college, obtained a teaching certificate, does not know the subjects, does not prepare, does not take teaching seriously, and simply uses the textbook, the assessments that come with the textbook, and the answer keys that come with the textbook—you cannot run a class like that.
So again, artificial intelligence exposes the problem. Many teachers are not teachers of their subjects. They are agents of the school system. They rely on the textbooks, the prepackaged assessments, and the answer keys, and then they fuss about children who use artificial intelligence.
A master teacher has no difficulty teaching and assessing student achievement in the age of AI. None. What is happening is that the actual nature and function of modern schooling is being exposed—the absence of any real attention to individual mastery, and the incompetence of many teachers. That is why they are fighting to have artificial intelligence banned.
And that is not only public schools. Private schools are just as bad. Christian schools are just as bad. Home schools are just as bad.
People Who Love Learning Love These Tools
People who love learning love artificial intelligence. I use it all day, every day. It helps me in countless ways. Things I could not do in the past, or that took a great deal of tedious time, can now be done quickly.
An example. Last night I was reading an assigned text for a course I am taking myself, on the history of the term “Middle East.” As I read, I kept meeting vocabulary and place names I was not familiar with. There was a reference to the Balkan states. I have heard that phrase countless times, and I do not think I had ever clearly looked up what the Balkan states actually are. I had an idea, but when I looked into it I found my idea was not quite right. It took twenty seconds to ask for a geographical description of the Balkan states.
That was not even my assignment. It was supplementary information that helped me understand what I was reading. In twenty seconds I had a clear description, and I was able to put it into my own words: “So the Balkan states are essentially the land between the Adriatic and the Black Sea.” Yes. Now I have a clear understanding.
Having a tool like that sitting on your desk, available twenty-four hours a day, is invaluable. It makes the use of time efficient and improves the quality of study. In the past, if you met something unfamiliar in a reading, you had to go find a dictionary or look it up in an encyclopedia—and most people simply did not do it. They kept reading and ignored it. They did not learn the new vocabulary. They did not learn the geographical detail. They pushed on through the reading without the comprehension they should have had.
Translation work is the same. Latin and Greek translation is so much easier with this help. Ninety percent of translation work is ordinary and familiar, but every so often there is a form that does not look right, or a word you have never seen. I have a worn-out Oxford Greek dictionary on my desk that I have used since college and spent countless hours thumbing through. Now I can paste in a word, get quick feedback, and keep moving in my study. It does not take away from study; it allows study to move more quickly and more confidently. And when I am not satisfied with an answer from an AI tool, I go look it up in authoritative sources—and I do.
Anyone who loves learning, anyone who is a serious student, who wants to study more and take on more difficult things and new subjects, loves the benefits of these tools.
The same is true of writing. If there is an article I would like to write, and I have four points clearly in my head, with two examples, three Scripture passages, and a quotation from Cicero, I can write a paragraph explaining that and have a draft composed for me. That saves an enormous amount of time. It communicates what I would have communicated, but it spares me the mechanical labor of typing out a draft, which is drudge work. Then I edit, clean things up, and publish within minutes—work that might once have taken hours or several evenings.
The Question the Critics Must Answer
The people complaining about artificial intelligence are, very often, people who do not want to learn. They want to use the assessments that come with the textbook. They want the answer keys. They want to reuse last year’s assignments, because they do not want to do that work again or think about it or change anything.
More importantly, if you are going to complain that artificial intelligence keeps students from learning by letting them get around the assignments, you have a question to answer:
What were you going to do instead to bring that individual student to mastery?
What was going to happen if that student did not use the AI tool? The answer is almost always: nothing. You were going to give him a bad grade and move on with the class. So who cares?
That is the reality of this situation. The teachers complaining were not going to do anything about it anyway. They are simply irritated that children are getting through their classes without studying, and they are too lazy to do anything about it. They are frustrated that their classes are being exposed, their grading methods are being exposed, their assessments are being exposed. It is all too easy. The standards are too low. They are unable or unwilling to raise them, so they are stuck where they are, unwilling to improve, and they have decided to blame the technology.
It is not the fault of the technology.
How We Handle This in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy
Obviously I have to deal with this myself. Our whole program is online. Students could copy assignments into an AI tool and paste the responses back. They can do that if they wish. It is remote learning, and I refuse to police that kind of activity.
There is a reason. All of the students in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy have parents. They are all studying at home, and their parents bear the responsibility to supervise their work. If parents will not supervise, then yes, children can cheat on whatever they like. And whose fault is that? It is the student’s fault for being dishonest, and it is the parents’ fault for being negligent.
Children can get away with it for a long time. I talk about this with my own children. You can get away with it when you submit an assignment. You can get away with it when you look up answers on a quiz. You can get away with it for years.
But at some point—at the most important moment of your life—you are going to sit for an interview, and you are not going to fool anyone.
Your studies should be pursued honestly, so that you can use them in real life. If you will not do that, it will catch up with you. When the day comes that a great decision must be made, and you do not have at your fingertips what you would have had if you had studied, you will miss the opportunity to decide rightly, and you will pay the price for your dishonesty.
The same is true for parents. If you choose not to supervise your children’s work, and your child sits for an interview with a college or for a scholarship, and you never made sure he was actually studying and learning, he will be exposed under questioning—and there will be no one else to blame.
The most important moments of our lives are live discussions, live interviews, live conversations. You cannot fake them. When you are examined by an expert, you cannot fake it. So the warning that ought to direct a student’s behavior is this: you should be studying to prepare for the most important interviews, conversations, and meetings of your life.
In the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, students may take quizzes and tests and submit assignments as many times as they wish in order to raise their scores. There is simply no reason to cheat. There are no artificial time limits and no deadlines—we do not even have the marking-period deadline that modern schools have. It is wide open. A student can study twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, focused on his own development, with support always available. If he has a question, he can send an email or a chat message and ask it.
There is no excuse for cheating in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. We are not afraid of artificial intelligence. We encourage students to use it. Our policies do not reward cheating, and we promote in every way we can the best progress students can make toward individual mastery.
That is the kind of work modern schools do not want to do.
A Confession
Unlike homeschool parents, teachers are responsible for academic honesty in their classrooms. Homework is the parents’ responsibility, but when children are at school, the teacher is responsible.
I will confess that I cheated as a high school student. I had a math teacher who was deaf and who used to sit at his desk and never move during class. I was in his Algebra II course and had no idea what the class was for. I had no moral compass at the time; I was a kid on the streets in public school. I would prepare a cheat sheet and place it on the teacher’s desk behind his calendar, because I knew he would not move for the entire period. My classmates saw it and never said a word, because we all knew the teacher did not care and would not check—and we all knew we needed the grade.
I needed a C average to play on the baseball team, and Algebra II was my nightmare. If I could get a C, I was fine, and nobody would care. There was no other standard. No higher purpose for that class was ever communicated to us. The situation was perfectly designed to reward cheating. We knew it, and the teachers knew it. They made no effort to prevent it; they only complained about it. But they were the cause of the environment that made cheating worthwhile.
That is what artificial intelligence threatens now—another level of the same thing. And the teachers are not interested in doing anything that would let students benefit from the technology. They want it banned, because it exposes modern schools and modern teachers.
Counsel for Parents and Students
As we move into this age, I would encourage students and parents to ask bigger questions.
Ask what the worst-case scenario actually is. What is really going to happen if my child enters a question or an assignment into an AI tool and the tool gives an answer? What is the outcome?
If you are a parent, your children should have to show you their work before they submit it. And as a parent you would know whether your child copied and pasted from an AI tool or spent three hours working on an assignment. It is really not complicated.
So ask yourself honestly: are you blaming AI because you are frustrated by the consequences it brings for parental responsibility, accountability, and supervision?
And for students: if you think you are going to fool anyone by copying and pasting from an AI tool, understand that I can look a student in the eye and see from his answer whether he is honest or not.
There is a passage in the Gospel of St. John which says that those who do evil hate the light, because the light exposes their deeds (John 3:19–21). They like the dark. They like to hide. They like to sit with the computer screen facing the wall. They like to be in another room, left alone, unsupervised. That is how dishonest people live, and it is very easy to see.
That same passage says that those who do the truth come to the light. They love to be examined. They love to be supervised. They love to be watched, because they know their deeds are honest and they know they deserve reward. Think about it—you do this all the time. “Mom, come look at my room,” because you cleaned it. “Dad, come look at this,” because it is honest work. When you are behaving well, you call people in to look. When you are behaving badly, you hide.
People who are honest are courageous. People who are dishonest are timid, fearful, cowardly.
So for the sake of your own character, if you want to be a courageous man, you must be an honest man. If you want to be confident, you must be honest. It is for your own character, your own happiness, and your own relationships that you should seek to be honest.
If you work hard and study honestly—even while using artificial intelligence, and I always make it openly known that I use AI tools of every kind, and every piece of technology I can get my hands on to do my work—not only will you do better, but you will be respected, and you will be confident. That is what should motivate you to be an honest person.
On Writing With Assistance
There will be people—and I deal with them constantly—who will try to make these things look shameful. “Oh, you wrote that with AI.”
Those people do not know what they are talking about. Men have used the writing of other men throughout all of history. When the head of a large corporation needs to send a message to his employees, do you think he sits down and types it out himself, or does he ask his secretary or a staff writer to compose it? He may review it, edit it, and give his approval; or if the writer is proven and trustworthy, he may simply authorize him to write and send it. Influential men do not do their own typing.
Look at books. There are often principal figures—the subject of a biography, for instance—and separate writers who actually produce the text, because that is relatively simple and tedious labor. That is how writing has always been done. That is why book series have editors. The editor conceives the plan, lays out the work to be done, establishes the principles, and assigns the writing to others. Sometimes those writers are known. Sometimes they are ghostwriters whose names no one ever learns. That is how writing works.
So using AI tools to help with writing is something entirely different from having an AI tool answer a question because you cannot answer it yourself. That is a different thing altogether. You will have to learn to ignore the critics, because they do not know what they are talking about.
But you must study in order to be able to answer the questions and solve the problems. When you have solved the problem, you may assign the writing of it to an AI tool—just as you might one day assign it to a secretary. Once you have established the plan, you can sketch it out and have the message typed up and sent to the whole company. The question is whether you can solve the problems, answer the questions, and arrive at the solutions. That is the real work. That is the difficult work. Gathering information and typing something out is the work of lower-level workers—and it is the work that artificial intelligence does.
So I encourage students to use these tools and every available technology. But remember: if you cannot solve the problems, if you cannot answer the questions, you will be the low-level worker, and you will be replaced by the technology.
If you depend on the technology, the technology will be your competition. If you can do the actual thinking and problem solving, the technology will always be at your service, and you will never face any competition from it.
I hope that is helpful. God bless.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P., is the founder and headmaster of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, whose mission since 2008 has been to research, restore, publish and teach the classical liberal arts.
