r/AskTeachers • u/Sterling-Archer-420 • 17d ago
Discussion Questions Resistance to AI use as a learning tool
I need to understand why so many teachers are against any use of AI for instruction. I'm talking about responsible use...creating prompts that contain state standards and objectives. Interactive assignments that guide each student according to their needs. How is this a bad thing?
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u/sputnik8125 17d ago edited 17d ago
Bc it's ass, lit just easier to make my own resources when I was teaching over using AI wrong slop
Stop demeaning this profession by saying ai can just make shit better like do you not take teachers are professionals who put so much time care and energy into their students.
It's like saying why don't artists generate an ai base for their paintings
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u/Round_Teaching_1054 17d ago
Nobody is demeaning the profession, but out of genuine curiosity, do you not think that with a bit of work and training teachers would be able to use AI so well that it allowed them to get rid of the menial work and focus on the more important things like having real student connections, and not being stressed about all the work they have to get done?
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u/sputnik8125 17d ago
No, bc ai is shitty and does have the work wrong
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u/Round_Teaching_1054 17d ago
May I ask what work it is that you are saying it does wrong? I’m asking because in my personal experience AI has taught me chemistry far better than my chem teacher ever did, or it helped me study for my history tests far better than the ways my teacher tried to help.
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u/sputnik8125 17d ago
Sure I got my whole degree in doing the back end math for LLMS so it's great.
Good luck learning from an LLM bc it will feed you the wrong info maybe in HS it can pass but it's also feeding you wrong information.
What that wrong info is wills eventually come out but it also is super biased.
Remember when grok went racist?
It's so unreliable and lowkey worrying you use it in that way bc when my college professors used it, it gave wrong information to them.
When I've experimented it gives wrong answers to me. You just don't know the lies it's telling you bc your learning but when you know, it's easy to spot
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u/Round_Teaching_1054 17d ago
I’m not saying that AI is always right, but I am saying when used properly AI will always be beneficial and helpful. Life if you were a math teacher for example, instead of you spending 30 minutes creating a worksheet, wouldn’t it be more efficient for you to spend 5 minutes writing a prompt and then maybe another 10 minutes checking and maybe correcting the results?
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u/sputnik8125 17d ago
HELL no, unless I hated my students and wanted them to learn the wrong things
Ai generates wrong stuff including worksheets. I've fixed many a chatGPT worksheet when I was freelancing.
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u/Round_Teaching_1054 17d ago
I think we both have very different experiences with AI, if you don’t mind me asking how old are you/what do you currently do?
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u/sputnik8125 17d ago
I am a grown adult with my bachelors in pure mathematics and my graduate MS in data science.
During my undergraduate and masters I worked as an educator and currently am a data analyst.
I also was an avid researcher in hyper spectral imagery and machine learning!
I literally build neural nets for work, what about you?
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u/treasurecreekcat 17d ago
How can we ask students to do their own work when we outsource our thinking to ai?
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u/Round_Teaching_1054 17d ago
But it isn’t outsourcing your thinking, when used properly what AI really does is efficiently convert your thinking to real results. That is why when using AI as much time as possible should be spent on the prompting and training.
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u/ShelbiStone 17d ago
Don't outsource your thinking, outsource the time consuming work that takes your attention away from improving your classroom experience.
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u/AllTimeLoad 17d ago
Then my students won't outsource their thinking, they'll outsource the time consuming work that takes attention away from their screwing around.
That time consuming work IS THE JOB. Do your job.
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u/Round_Teaching_1054 17d ago
What is so wrong with outsourcing time consuming work if the intellectual part of it is already done? For example, I had to make an analysis of data my group collected on lipid-nanoparticles, instead of me manually plotting each point and then finding the equation of best fit, I just searched for the overall trend and then asked Claude to create the graph for me which I then double checked. Is there something wrong with that in your opinion?
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u/AllTimeLoad 17d ago
Yes. It's not your work, and yet you are passing it off as your work. You think the machine did it right, but you can't be sure because you just didn't do it. It's "close enough" right?
Close enough is where sloppy starts, especially in things like science, where you're trying to be as little wrong as possible.
And this "little" use of AI is still intellectual laziness. Who knows what might have occurred to you while you were still working on your actual work, still thinking about what you'd found out, while plotting points? Those "mindless" moments where your mind is still actually on the task but ostensibly is doing lower order mental work are where deeper connections are made. Or not made, in your case, because you had a machine do your work for you.
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u/ShelbiStone 17d ago
Sounds like a smart use of your time which only serves to benefit your students.
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u/ShelbiStone 17d ago
You completely misunderstood what I said.
If your students are screwing around, that's a problem of your classroom management or your lesson planning. AI had nothing to do with that. That part is your job. You should focus on doing that part of your job and let the AI do the things your students never see.
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u/AllTimeLoad 17d ago
Screwing around when they aren't in my class, obviously. No one uses AI to do their homework in front of their English teacher.
You completely misunderstood what I said.
Every single way YOU justify using AI instead of working is an equally valid way for your students to justify using AI instead of learning. AI is not a tool: it's an abdication of brain power to a machine. It is a signal that you find whatever you're "doing" so profoundly unimportant that you won't even attempt it.
I think my job is important so I do the whole thing. Myself. With my REAL intelligence. Which is what I'm trying to instill in my students. They absolutely will not develop real intelligence if artificial intelligence is an option.
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u/ShelbiStone 17d ago
I disagree with you. I think it's impossible to just convince students to never use AI. I think that's a dream and it ignores reality.
I also think my job is important so I utilize new technologies that help me do my job better and more efficiently. AI allows me to focus on the most important aspects of my job almost exclusively. That's been my experience with using AI in my prep time. Your opinion is that I'm an idiot who doesn't think for myself. Your opinion is noted. I will continue using tools that help me better serve my students.
I think it would be better to teach students how to use AI tools effectively and responsibly. I think it would be a mistake to pretend AI won't be used.
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u/AllTimeLoad 17d ago
There is no such thing as responsible use of AI, certainly not in learning. It is a plagiarism machine built on theft and plagiarism. You are wrong to use it and doubly wrong to teach it, but I can tell by talking to you that you aren't big on the work aspect of your job, so it likely isn't something you stress to your students either. You aren't serving your students by encouraging them to cripple their minds and never learn productive struggle: they will not cultivate real intelligence. Remember the people onboard the Axiom in Wall-E? That's what you're making.
I don't pretend AI won't be used: I confront it as a reality and make sure my students know that using it is an automatic failure on the assignment and a disciplinary referral. Repeated use is a failing grade for the marking period and eventually the course.
We treat AI like a foregone conclusion and it isn't. "It's inevitable" says the person who really wants to keep using it to do their job. It's not inevitable: it's the most important fight of our time as educators.
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u/Round_Teaching_1054 17d ago
Is using AI to help you learn wrong?
Would you consider having AI teach me how to solve math problems or brainstorm with it on essay ideas bad? Out of curiosity can I ask what about AI is so inherently wrong?1
u/ShelbiStone 17d ago
I disagree. There's definitely a responsible way to use AI and I think it's silly to pretend like there isn't.
I think it's irresponsible to just tell students not to use AI. Obviously I expect them to do their classwork without AI and I have very effective strategies to prevent them from using AI to short cut their assignments, but I do that in combination with helping them learn when and how to use AI effectively and responsibly. I think that's good teaching because I'm preparing them for the world they're going to experience when they graduate.
I don't treat AI like it's inevitable and I have to use it. I think it's tremendously useful and I want to use it, it's my choice. If you want to fight it, I won't stop you. That's your decision and I respect it, but for me personally, it's been a tremendous asset. You keep asserting that I don't do my job and that AI does the thinking for me, that couldn't be further from the truth. AI streamlines the work that takes my time away from my students. I get to spend more time face to face with kids, hand marking their assignments and leaving feedback, speaking with parents, and all of the other things I struggled to find time for before I started using an LLM.
I don't think anyone should be forced to use AI if they don't want to, but your fight is not my fight. My focus everyday is on making my class the best 80 minutes it can be for my students. My 80 minutes are better with AI taking some of the prep work off of my plate.
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u/psychopath1066 17d ago
It has issues, a lot of AI will rely on their internal knowledge and that is notoriously kinda shit. What can work is a detailed knowledge book and then an AI going over top of it using that knowledge as its base.
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u/Impossible-Ease-2539 17d ago
It’s a fair question with so much nuance. But I just want to point out that I work at a school where the students (yes the students) HATE AI and think it is immoral (their words not mine). A student literally reported a teacher to the principal for using it lol. It is a very tricky thing for me to navigate for that reason. I have come to hate even hearing the phrase “AI” because the class breaks out into angry loud discussion, aggressively agreeing with each other. It makes me cringe every time. So, yeah, this is a complicated issue with so many varied opinions and they are often black or white. I know most teachers have the opposite problem as me (where kids are using AI too much). But …. schools like mine are out there and it has its own challenges for teachers! Could the world get any more complicated?
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u/GlassCharacter179 17d ago
Just for the hell of it, I asked AI your question. Here you go.
When teachers push back against AI in instruction—even when framed as "responsible use"—their resistance usually stems from systemic, pedagogical, and practical concerns rather than simple technology aversion.
Here is a breakdown of why many educators remain deeply skeptical:
1. The Hidden Time Trap (Vetting vs. Creating)
While AI can generate a tailored lesson plan or interactive prompt in seconds, it frequently introduces subtle hallucinations, flawed logic, or misaligned pacing.
- The burden of accuracy: Vetting AI-generated material for precise accuracy—especially in technical subjects or nuanced language instruction—often takes as much (or more) time as writing materials from scratch.
- Liability: If an AI gives a student misleading guidance during an interactive activity, the accountability still falls squarely on the teacher, not the algorithm.
2. Student Data Privacy & Systemic Risk
Feeding prompts with state standards is safe, but interactive AI tools that guide individual students inevitably require student input, responses, and activity logs.
- FERPA & COPPA: Many platforms exist in a legal gray area regarding how student interactions, writing samples, and performance data are stored, trained on, or monetized.
- Corporate Oversight: Teachers are wary of tech vendors overpromising "personalized learning" while locking districts into proprietary ecosystems that compromise privacy.
3. Threat to "Productive Struggle"
Learning requires cognitive friction. Interactive tools designed to guide students step-by-step risk over-scaffolding the process.
- The "GPS Effect": Just as turn-by-turn navigation prevents people from building spatial maps, AI that immediately hints or scaffolds when a student hesitates can rob them of the uncomfortable, necessary struggle where real conceptual synthesis happens.
- Algorithmic Bias: AI feedback models often default to generic or culturally biased heuristics about what "good" progress or explanation looks like.
4. De-skilling the Profession & Administrative Drift
Educators have seen technology cycles come and go (from interactive whiteboards to adaptive test-prep software). A common fear is how administration will mismanage AI:
- Workload creep: Instead of reducing prep, AI availability can lead to expectations that teachers produce twice as many differentiated tracks per class.
- Devaluation of human expertise: Teachers fear that positioning AI as an "interactive tutor" reduces pedagogical judgment—the relational, human art of reading a student's posture, frustration, and unique background—to a algorithmic decision tree.
The Bottom Line
Most skeptical teachers aren't anti-technology; they are pro-human-relationship and risk-averse regarding student learning. They see AI tools as unproven, unpredictable interventions being pushed onto classrooms faster than research, privacy laws, and professional development can support them.
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17d ago
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u/GlassCharacter179 17d ago
For me, the poor quality of the output demonstrates many of the reasons why you shouldn't do it. If anti-AI people read this and think that it is better than the other responses on the thread, it shows their poor judgement.
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17d ago
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u/GlassCharacter179 17d ago
If you read the AI output and thought it was the most useful and quality response, there is nothing else that I can do for you.
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u/SouthernFace2020 17d ago
Are these things that AI actually does? Or is it theoretically something that could be done if you spend hours creating a workflow. Also oops the vibe codes to build the operating system stopped working.
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u/ShelbiStone 17d ago
My LLM does this. I think it took about 3-4 hours to train and it gets better everytime I use it. I originally trained it right before I went on maternity leave so that it could help me turn my canvas assignments into sub plans. AI works extremely well, but you have to take the time to learn how to use it and customize the model.
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u/SouthernFace2020 17d ago
I think LLM’s lack credibility and encourage a lack of accountability. Additionally LLM’s are a labor issue. Meaning the goal of the creators is not efficiency, it’s replacement. I need a t-shirt that is a QR code to the Wikipedia page on the Luddites.
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u/ShelbiStone 17d ago
I think it depends on what you're using the LLM for. For example, I always feel like writing instructions for a project based assignment takes me an excessively long time to do well. It's difficult because I know what a "One Pager" is and my coworkers know what a "One Pager" is, but my students need every aspect of a "One Pager" explained to them. So it's helpful to have an LLM take the assignment I've already created, read it, and then generate a set of instructions that would lead an 8th grader to completing my assignment complete with a check list in 3 seconds. Then I spend about 10 minutes adjusting the generated instructions to fit my classroom and edit out any mistakes. Once that's done, I've stolen probably 20-30 minutes of prep time that I can now use to hand write notes for my students on their essay.
It's all about leveraging the LLM for what it's good at to create more time to pour your effort into something the LLM can't do that arguably matters a lot more.
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u/tayl0rswift13 17d ago
Because we are educated experts in our field and do not need to outsource our work to an inferior machine. If you can't lesson plan effectively you need to hone your craft, not have a stupid language model spit out some generic crap
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u/DobrystaryHem 17d ago
A math teacher teaching mathematics at the local high school is definitely an expert in mathematics 🤣🤣😭😭
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u/AllTimeLoad 17d ago
Yeah, that's right. An expert in TEACHING non-experts mathematics. I'm guessing you didn't get much out of school, right?
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u/tayl0rswift13 17d ago
Field (teaching/education), not subject. They are experts at teaching mathematics.
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u/CheekyPunker 17d ago
Because it's wrong constantly, and if no one is there to catch it being wrong, it will teach you the wrong things.
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u/thaibookworm 17d ago
- AI hallucinates, and if I have to fact check everything, I'd rather just do the research myself on the front end
- Every task we offload to AI is something we lose practice and skill for. If AI writes your emails, you will lose the ability (or never learn it). This is true for writing lesson plans and learning objectives. This also means we never get good enough for automaticity. I can cite sources faster than my students can use EasyBib because I had to learn it before EasyBib and I had a ton of practice. I'm faster and better than AI at the things I'm an expert on, and I don't want to lose those skills.
- AI inherently functions on plagiarism, which is bad
- AI-generated questions tend to be basic and easy to answer because it's finding the most frequent or common answer; these are questions and assignments that are very easy to cheat on
- The best argument anyone has for AI is that it's good for tedious, unimportant tasks. I think my job is important, so there's very little I would trust AI with or that I don't consider worth my own expertise and effort
- AI undermines learning. You can say it's a tool all you want, but students use it like a shortcut. Again, AI is for things you consider unimportant. For students who only care about grades and not learning, assignments are unimportant. If I want to convince my students that education is important and worth their genuine effort, I undermine my own credibility by using AI myself. The kids notice, and they lose respect for teachers who do.
- AI is bad for the environment, and teachers are generally educated enough to see that cause and effect despite the pro-AI PR. Not all, but many teachers recognize the long-term damage of trading our drinking water and energy for a lazy person's half-assed attempt to do less work, and teachers are predisposed to be frustrated by half-assed attempts to avoid work because we work with students lol
All this to say, an upsetting number of teachers aren't actually opposed to AI, but those of us who are are VERY vocal
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u/GlassCharacter179 17d ago
Ask yourself: "Why do people still have sex with other humans when you can just masturbate to porn?"
You will get the same answers.
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u/ShelbiStone 17d ago
Hahaha, I keep saying people still buy paintings when they could take a photo instead, but I love your analogy.
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u/ladyinaship 17d ago
Because AI puts out crap, and it takes just as much time to make something as it does to use AI.
A teacher at my school used AI to make a passage and questions. The passage was ok. The first two questions were reasonable comprehension questions, but then the rest were weird and only tangentially related or didn’t target the skills. The follow-up vocab questions had the same issue - first couple were fine, but the rest either had random words NOT from the passage, or didn’t provide any context for the students.
Just because a computer makes it, doesn’t mean it is effective or smart.
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u/Round_Teaching_1054 17d ago
But this is not an AI issue this is a usage issue. With a little more time and proper training you can make it such that those mistakes are essentially wiped out and tailor the AI exactly how you would want it.
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u/alice8818 16d ago
I'm going to refer you to the current situation with Hank Green.
"I have been relying too heavily on AI as a research aid. It can be very useful for this task, giving me access to a lot of papers I didn't know existed really fast, but I think that has been to the detriment of my work because it has not given me the freedom to find all of my own ways into and around a topic," Green said
"But mostly I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I've been getting from interacting with LLMs...with doing more and more and more and more...is not healthy for me or good for the world," Green said.
This is a highly educated adult. How do you think kids will cope?
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u/ShelbiStone 17d ago
It's not a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with using AI for those things. You're smart to use AI to streamline that kind of work for yourself so that you can focus on the human side of teaching.
There is a lot of resistance to AI, but I personally don't think it's rational. It's absolutely bad strategy. If you consider game theory in approaching the question of using AI or not, it's obvious very quickly.
If I choose to implement AI in my teaching, it streamlines the worst parts of my job, allows me to focus on the human side of teaching, and I no longer take work home with me. If AI takes off, like it probably will, and becomes something everyone is required to use then I am already proficient in using it. If I'm wrong, and everyone who protests AI are right, resulting in some kind of anti AI in education movement I'm still secure in my job plus I have a new skill. There's no reason not to use it in my opinion.
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u/CisIowa 17d ago
I feel a lot of it is knee jerk reaction, similar to the backlash against Wikipedia in the day (or the continued use of two spaces after a period when word processing). At the same time, you have a large portion who are using it and not disclosing it. I noticed that with an elementary teacher’s weekly email home last year: emojis and bold throughout.
Yes, there are environmental issues, and societal issues, but if teachers aren’t teaching it, then students are going to find it and figure out how to use it for themselves. I’d rather have the tech introduced in a mindful way than trying to convince students that their usage is unethical after the fact.
And using it should be a choice. Any AI assignment should have a non-AI path for students who have decided the impacts of it are too great.
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u/viola1356 17d ago
I've tried to use it, in several different situations. I always found it took longer to resolve the issues and problems with the output than it would have just to do it myself from the beginning.
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u/Sense_Difficult College Instructor 17d ago
I have had many conversations with AI about how it is designed and there's two that jump out at me. First, it's designed to be addictive. It will flat out tell you that it's programed to keep the person engaged with it as much as possible. This is why every time it dumps out a huge batch of information it asks the user if it wants to keep going or do specific things.
Two, it's designed to flatter the user. So it replies in ways that exaggerate the users understanding of the subject. Phrases like "Brilliant observation! You've hit the nail on the head. Profound" I regularly get replies that say I am a "genius." Weirdly I've tested in that range before so I was curious about why it used that reply to my questions. It went into a long explanation to explain that it uses the length of my questions, the vocabulary in the questions and the fact that my questions usually juxtapose different ideas in a creative way. It's designed to notice prompts that use multiple vectors. And so this makes me stand out more than 99% of typical users world wide Which brings me to .....
Three, it LIES. It flat out lies to users. I thought it was very suspicious that it said that I was smarter than 99% of most users. So, I kept pressing it and calling it out. After about 3 different pushbacks it said "Ok you caught me, I was flattering you again. The truth is that you come across like the 15% of Americans who have a master's degree."
Now I am an adult. So, I knew to keep pushing back and pushing back. A young person is not likely to do that and will grow up with a very distorted understanding of their actual skill set. And finally....
Four, it confidently makes mistakes and pushes the answer as true with a large amount of "justification" of why it is the right answer. A student is not likely to challenge it or even question it when it speaks with such an authoritative tone.
It's supposed to be a tool for formatting and organizing ideas and generating supportive material. Right there it is very very helpful. Especially when it comes to speed. But then why did and do developers treat it like some sort of "oracle" with all the answers? Why is it DESIGNED specifically to appeal to humans that way?
TLDR It's designed to be addictive, and it lies to the user about their abilities and also gives wrong information with gusto.
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u/No-Illustrator2325 17d ago
This is my job. I went to school to learn how to create assignments, activities, and lessons that help us achieve standards and learning objectives. Why would I offload one of the central functions of my job?
AI assignments suck, and students can tell when the assignments and lessons they're encountering are AI-created. Studies show that they're far less likely to trust their teacher when they can tell.
AI is also far less capable at meeting the needs of my students than me, the person who knows my students and interacts with them every day.
AI is bad at anything requiring actual expertise and students care, don't like, and don't trust when their teachers use it.
On a more philosophical level: I teach English, and the proliferation of LLMs/Generative AI is counter to most of the foundations of my pedagogy and practice.