I wrote a piece for The Hechinger Report this week arguing something I’ve believed since ChatGPT first shipped but have been reluctant to say this plainly: AI is a drug. Not as a figure of speech for how it makes you feel — I mean it the way we talk about anything freely available, mildly addictive, and being consumed in enormous quantities by people who’ve had no education about what it does to them.
The reflex with drugs is to ban them, and the reflex in a lot of schools right now is to ban AI. But we already ran that experiment with “Just Say No,” and we know how it went. What actually built resistance was education — honest information about effects, dosage, and risk.
Which raises the obvious question for anyone teaching right now: if not abstinence, then what’s the right dose? I have a partial answer, and it came from a classroom moment I didn’t expect — I went in braced for the worst thing AI could do to my students, and watched something close to the opposite happen instead.
That’s the piece. Read it here, and if it’s useful, send it to someone who’s still deciding whether to ban the thing.
TEACHER VOICE: AI is an addictive drug that must be researched, studied and confined
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