“I feel like we have started talking more openly about AI, but there’s also very much a feeling among teachers of, ‘Oh, aren’t we supposed to not use that?’” said Jen Goodnow, who attended the workshop and teaches English-as-a-new-language (ENL) and French classes at Sunset Park High School in Brooklyn. “What is the city saying about AI use in the classroom? What is the district saying? There’s not a lot of clarity right now.”

Teachers across the country are increasingly wrestling with knotty questions about whether and how to embrace AI in their classrooms, a tension that has simmered after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022 inaugurated today’s widespread chatbot use.

Since then, academic institutions at nearly every level have vacillated between outright AI bans to formal partnerships with AI companies.

As the use of AI has spread, some educators who have taught the same material for decades are finding that certain AI tools can simplify time-consuming tasks like creating lesson plans or decks of flash cards. At the same time, AI systems still raise significant questions about the role of creativity, critical-thinking and the purpose of education — for teachers and for their students.

Recent research has shown that generative AI is already a mainstay for a majority of American students and teachers. One report found that 84 percent of high school students use generative AI tools for schoolwork, while another found over half of grade school teachers used AI for their work.

New York City’s schools exemplify the fraught and evolving relationship between schools and AI. The school district banned the use of ChatGPT in early 2023, arguing that it “does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills,” before reversing course several months later. After the district’s superintendent signaled a desire to embrace AI in late 2024, schools across the city are now experimenting with AI to varying degrees.

“I’m still personally hesitant about AI,” said April Rose, who teaches computer and technology classes at an elementary school in Queens. Rose also serves as a coach and trainer for other teachers within her school and wanted to attend the training to ensure she is a helpful resource for her fellow educators.

“I still want my creativity,” Rose said about her skepticism towards using AI at work. “It’s the whole ‘Terminator’ mentality that the robots are going to take over. So I’m cautious about how I’m using it. But I also can’t get lost and fall behind the times. That’s why I wanted to make sure I came here and dabbled with it myself.”

The academy hosts one- and two-day in-person trainings for teachers from across the United States with a range of exposure to AI, from complete beginners to seasoned daily users, in addition to offering a range of online resources and guides about AI for educators.

As someone who uses AI “very, very little,” Goodnow, the ENL teacher, said she was eager to learn more about the technology in general.

“I’ve started using AI more this year because my colleagues are talking about it in the teachers lounge,” she said, adding that she has occasionally consulted ChatGPT outside the classroom for crocheting advice and recipe recommendations.

Though Goodnow initially wanted to attend the training to better understand how to design prompts or questions for AI systems, she was quickly “blown away” by a discussion about the core values for using AI in education that opened the workshop.

These nine core values, designed by the AFT, span practical and ethical issues from AI’s ability to tailor instruction to individual students (Core Value 2: “Empower Educators to Make Educational Decisions”) to the need to build AI literacy and skepticism towards deepfakes and AI-generated misinformation (Core Value 5: “Advance Democracy”).

“Halfway through the presentation, I had already started texting assistant principals and drafting an email to my principal saying ‘we need to have an ethics committee for AI’ and asking about what kind of guidance we’re getting from the district.”

As CEO of the academy for AI instruction and a former teacher of 20 years in Colorado, Rob Weil is dedicated to empowering educators to harness AI’s capabilities for good.

“K-12 school has a huge impact on and responsibility for the social and emotional growth of people,” he said. “That’s something we shouldn’t be threatening with AI tools.”

“If we just do the same thing teachers have been doing for a long time, then AI could absolutely be detrimental. That’s why the academy exists, to learn about how to use AI in the right way, an ethical way, an appropriate way.”

After the discussion on core values, the workshop had hands-on sessions with AI tools to design lesson plans, flash cards and even educational songs.

Several workshop participants, like Joanna Stillman, were already very familiar with AI. Stillman teaches computer and technology classes to elementary school children in Staten Island.

“I love incorporating AI into my classes because my school is mostly ENL students, and we have students with disabilities,” Stillman said, referring to the high proportion of students in her school who speak English as a second or third language.

Stillman, like Goodnow and many other teachers, noted that AI can help tailor her lessons for students of different abilities, creating more-advanced activities for higher-performing students and more-basic tasks for students who are functionally illiterate in English.

Stillman mostly uses Canva and Adobe, two graphic-design software products, for AI lessons instead of more-general AI services like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. Her students are currently using Canva’s AI functions to design ugly holiday sweaters.

“It’s wonderful to reach out to and engage them with AI,” she said, describing how students play around with text prompts to direct the AI systems to create seasonal showpieces.

While Stillman highlighted the importance of AI in making learning enjoyable and unleashing students’ imagination, she joined many of her colleagues in emphasizing the importance of choosing proper AI tools and implementing sensible safeguards to ensure AI does not negatively affect students. Many large AI companies have come under heightened regulatory scrutiny, and in some cases are being sued over their use by teenagers and children. Several parents have said AI chatbots have been involved in their children’s deaths by suicide.

“The internet is a scary place. Once we know the internet can tell you lies, we apply the same lessons to AI. You always have to make sure your sources and information are legit,” Stillman said.

ChatGPT, for instance, “is like the drunk uncle,” said Stillman. “It will give you information, but you don’t know how true it is.”

“Not too long ago, I put up three different pictures in class and asked students which one is fake,” Stillman continued. “They said ‘that one’s real, that one’s fake, the other one is fake.’ But all three were fake. Their minds were blown.”

Weil, the academy’s CEO, agrees with the need for more skepticism toward AI systems and advocates for a ban on companion AI chatbots or systems for students under 18 years old.

“These algorithms are written in a way to be sycophantic, and so they seem like your friend because they’re trained to be your friend. They’re not trained to tell you the truth.”

Many AI companies acknowledge that their models can be sycophantic. In late April, OpenAI released a regular update that drastically increased ChatGPT’s sycophancy before walking it back to a model “with more balanced responses.” OpenAI said in a statement that it recognized that this behavior could seem “uncomfortable or unsettling” and “raise safety concerns.”

More importantly, Weil said, AI “should not be a replacement for human interaction and human relationships. Human relationships can be messy and really problematic and hard, but that’s the beauty of humanity.”

Faced with an often-crushing dearth of resources and little time to provide individual attention to students, many teachers at the workshop were eager to learn how AI systems can enhance — not replace — existing education methods.

“I want to move past the fact that teachers are using AI to help them with lesson plans,” said Rose, the computer skills teacher who works in Queens, citing one of the more commonly-used examples of AI in the classroom today. “We want to delve deeper and dig deeper. I want to make sure that all of us are well informed and that teachers understand all the different uses of AI.”