How wonderful it is
that nobody need wait a single moment
before starting to improve the world.
—Anne Frank
It’s my Sisyphean labor: what’s AI done now to impact teaching and learning? The latest three items to come to my attention are: A) the evidence for how it is curbing creativity, B) the growing removal of adults from the learning equation, and C) personalized avatars for CEOs and college professors. I will be exploring each in that order.
I’ve written before, of course, about the decline in creativity in this country. But the latest research out of the lab of Georgetown University neuroscientist Adam Green has demonstrated that the impact of AI has accelerated this decline dramatically. Green and his colleagues have followed the essay writing habits of college-bound high school students over the past 8 years, specifically tracking the quantity of novel ideas found in application essays before and after the introduction of ChatGPT, and what they have found is that there were 8 times more original ideas in those essays before ChatGPT became available. Process that for a moment: if there were 100 original ideas in all the essays submitted to a given college or university this past fall, there were 800 original ideas submitted to that same school in the fall of 2021!
Worse, Green and his national research team found “that A.I. has the largest homogenizing impact on students who are farthest from the mean and have unique perspectives, including neurodivergent students and those from racial and linguistic minorities.” Thus, the problem as fellow researcher Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institute summarizes is that “A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge, [constricting] our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas.”
But it’s not just creativity on the decline. So is the reliance of children on actual humans to help them with their schoolwork. Common Sense Media (a nonprofit devoted to healthy technology use among young people) reports that almost 25% of children between the ages of 9 and 17 now inform researchers that “they would turn to a chatbot for help with schoolwork or homework before seeking guidance from a trusted adult such as a teacher, counselor, or parent.” Furthermore, 85% in that same age group report having used AI for at least one of their recent assignments, with 50% reporting using it weekly and 20% daily. Yet perhaps most telling of all is that 42% claim that “it would be very or somewhat hard for them to give it [AI] up for a month.”
Clearly, this represents a significant shift in the traditional learning habits of children and a “growing reliance on AI as a first-stop resource for problem-solving and decision-making among young people.” As Michael Robb, head of research at Common Sense points out, today’s youth are adopting this technology even more rapidly than they did the use of social media, and “AI is already a part of childhood in a way I think maybe people haven’t really grappled with yet. This is not about the future. This is happening right now across different age bands, across gender, across race and income levels as well.” In short, AI dependence for schooling is already firmly ensconced in their learning behaviors, and its use is only accelerating among today’s tween and adolescent populations.
But here’s where the third story to come across my digital desk adds a twist to these changes in children’s study habits that I think has the potential to serve as the living embodiment of the Platonic ideal for the concept of irony. Because in a world of multi-tasking and 24/7 expectations:
consultants and executive coaches who don’t have the bandwidth to address every inquiry are referring some clients to their A.I. doubles. Harvard Business School professors have incorporated A.I. versions of themselves into courses and office hours. And executives are using their A.I. avatars to address employees in other countries in their own languages.
Hence, people in high-demand positions are essentially generating AI avatars of themselves to handle all the potential claims on their attention which they themselves cannot handle directly.
Furthermore, so popular has this trend become that entire software programs now exist (such as Delphi for impersonating voice and HeyGen and Synthesia for mimicking video appearance) to produce these digital stand-ins. Indeed, so easy is it to whip up one’s own personal chatbot, that Jeremy Allaire, the C.E.O. of the cryptocurrency company, Circle, simply built his using Anthropic’s Claude by training it “to think and write like him, feeding it his podcast interviews, his public writing and a corpus of internal communications.”
Now I want you to re-read that last part of that sentence with my added emphasis to Allaire’s quote: to think and write like him, feeding it his podcast interviews, his public writing and a corpus of [his] internal communications. Without a lifetime of pre-existing material that Jeremy Allaire had already generated on his own using his pre-AI trained brain, there is no Jeremy Allaire avatar. Sorry to metaphorically club people over the head with the obvious, but none of the avatars of any of these consultants, executive coaches, C.E.Os and professors referenced in this NYT’s story could exist if they had not already spent their earlier professional lives doing the cognitive heavy-lifting to put them in their respective positions in the first place!
I am confident now that my readers see why I might have claimed a potential Platonic ideal for irony: those same AI programs that make these avatars possible risk preventing (in at least one generation, if not more!) the very cognitive heavy-lifting needed to create the unique raw material for generating such an avatar in the first place. THIS is where I think we should be so highly concerned about the impact of AI on our collective future. Not some Terminator Armageddon but the slow decline into a world of WALL●E. For to quote Rebecca Winthrop again:
Our species’ ability to come up with unexpected and original ideas is something to protect and nurture. That’s especially true for today’s adolescents. A world where creative thinking flourishes is a world that has a better chance to weather the changes that A.I. will bring.
And I would add: any other changes we face as well.
We stand, then, not at a precipice but at a slippery slope, and as we are observing in situations as diverse as schools and (interestingly enough) the restaurant dining industry, many of the adults in the world are starting to push back. The question is whether it will be enough, soon enough. So stay tuned (“same bat-time, same-bat channel!”) as I keep pushing my “stone.”
References
Kessler, S. (June 8, 2026) “Talk to My A.I. Twin”: Busy Executives Have a New Productivity Hack. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/06/business/dealbook/ai-digital-twin.html?unlocked_article_code=1.oVA.YuTi.T-BRz2tV71vo&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.
Prothero, A. (June 8, 2026) Kids Are Turning to AI Before Adults for Homework Help. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/technology/kids-are-turning-to-ai-before-adults-for-homework-help/2026/06.
Tkacik, C. (June 17, 2026) The Dish: Many Restaurateurs Love ChatGPT. Many Diner’s Don’t. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebanner.com/culture/food-drink/chatgpt-ai-restaurants-food-photography-DRANOQEY2BCJRFY2FTMUOMFDG4/.
Winthrop, R. (May 27, 2026) What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/opinion/writing-creativity-ai.html.
Light a Candle 