It was a scenario worthy of a TV sitcom: To make a case to the state board of education for cell phone limits in Alaska schools, state education commissioner and former Anchorage school district superintendent Deena Bishop leaned heavily on an AI text generator – and failed to remove fabricated citations she added to support her arguments. Had she been a high school student, Bishop would have received an F on the assignment and a stern lecture about doing her own work. Embarrassingly, our top education executive is under-educated about the proper use of AI, and we shouldn’t be sending our students out into the world as ill-equipped.

The AI ​​debacle was doubly unfortunate because it distracted from two other valuable discussions we should be having about education and technology—first, Bishop’s thread asking for AI help to address the limits of cell phones in schools. It’s ironic that the quotes hallucinated by Bishop’s AI assistant were fake because they exist extensive real-world data indicating that cell phone limits in schools are beneficial for student success and social-emotional well-being. Banning cell phones on school grounds is strongly correlated with higher math scores and is widely supported by teachers who witness the distracting effects of phones on their students. The state board of education shouldn’t let Bishop’s misstep distract it from the serious issue at hand — and the potential to reverse some of the distractions that have crept into the classroom.

The other unfortunate aspect of Bishop’s quote-fabrication faux-pas is that it shows a lack of maturity in the ways we use artificial intelligence—even at the highest levels of our government. Although the temptation has been strong, especially in schools, to impose a blanket ban on the use of artificial intelligence in schoolwork, this is not a technology that will disappear – on the contrary, we must expect it to become more deeply embedded these days. – today’s lives in the years to come.

With this in mind, the solution cannot be to impose some kind of monastic moratorium on technology, but rather to carefully integrate it into the curriculum and teach students how to use it responsibly. In the face of such a game-changing development, the impulse to panic is strong, and especially in schools, we shy away from doing things differently than we’ve been taught. But just as computers did not produce students who could not do math, the advent of language and imaging tools, deployed wisely, will not result in students being unable to think critically.

It’s up to us as parents and educators to find ways that AI can be a valuable teaching tool, rather than a crutch used only to save time and reduce effort. Consider, as just one example, how students enrolling a chatbot as a partner in a Socratic dialogue about a lesson topic could lead to insights that are not otherwise feasible given a teacher’s time constraints in a particular class period.

The road between where we are now and the point where AI will be seamlessly integrated into our society will certainly be a bumpy one, but it will only get bumpier if we don’t focus on using our technological tools properly. We should be careful about the ways we use AI to help us, making sure we don’t put off our work on it, but rather use its abilities to expand our own horizons, to synthesize data we wouldn’t otherwise -we would have considered and use their results. as a springboard to solve our problems creatively—a valuable human skill.

And whether the person using AI is a student creating an outline for an essay or a commissioner of education looking to brief a state school board on policy, we’d be wise to check what it’s telling us, lest we end up to be embarrassed by the naive confidence that the friendly suggestion-spitting machine will never lead us astray. After all, who among us has never been told by our GPS driving assistant to turn down a road that didn’t exist?