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Teachers should be embracing AI, not banning it

Why AI is here to stay, in the class and on the job.

Brad LaPlante
4 min readAug 20, 2024

Artificial intelligence is one of the most polarizing topics on the internet. After the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, other tools like DALLE or Gemini, and Apple’s integration with ChatGPT and other AI tools into its devices this year, it’s quite clear that AI is here to stay.

Perhaps most torn over artificial intelligence discussions are teachers in college classrooms. On one hand, a teacher’s job is to promote critical thinking. At the same time, students could miss out on learning about critical technology that they will probably end up using in the workplace anyway.

In a survey by Harvard Crimson, 47 percent of Harvard’s faculty is pessimistic about AI’s effect on higher education.

When the internet began to gain massive appeal in the 2000s, Wikipedia was often cited as being an “unreliable source.” Teachers in grade-school classrooms taught students to stay away from sites like Wikipedia, as they can be edited by anyone, ignoring the fact that Wikipedia articles are monitored daily by an exhaustive list of volunteers and even provide a full list of sources that cite information. When a page is unreliable, Wikipedia is transparent about that.

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Brad LaPlante
Brad LaPlante

Written by Brad LaPlante

I write about gadgets and video games.

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