Does AI Have A Seat In The Classroom?
Brandon Diaz | FOR THE QC
January 29, 2026
The usage of AI tools in classrooms is at an all-time high. When Open AI, Google Gemini, and Grok at students’ fingertips, classwork is now more avoidable than ever. professors and fellow students are having to adapt to this new era of learning which brings its own challenges. These issues are attempting to define boundries in terms of how AI is used as well as its potential for misinformation and misuse. Some professors are also concerned about AI diminishing students’ critical thinking capacities.
Gage Smith, a lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology, was an early adapter when it came to preparing for the AI flood. He structured his classes using oldschool methods such as in-class blue-book essays and journaling and in-class discussions.
“It’s been a few years of me running my classes like this to the point of when I first did it other professors looked at me like I was crazy,” he says.
As for the current scramble to come to terms with AI in education, Smith says, “The discussions are like, two, three years too late. I was talking about it at my departmental meetings back in like 2022 when I started changing stuff, but we started as a faculty talking about it in late 2024.”
Smith is not entirely against the use of AI. “If it is collaborative work with AI, which is what I try to encourage in all my classrooms and promote in all my classrooms, I think it could be a beneficial thing.” Smith claims, “but if you are going to lean on AI to do everything and just take a back seat, you will fail.”
Still, Smith says he encounters students misusing AI in his classes. “There was a group of students that I could tell just copy and pasted the prompt from inside the syllabus and gave it to AI. AI wasn’t able to parse the nuance of that prompt very well and ended up doing a little bit on all the topics that were assigned to all the other groups.”
This is just one of many incidents that Smith has run into as a professor, and he cares about students misusing AI. “What I am hopeful students will take away from my classes is that critical thought is important, and by gathering information and going through that process on paper you will not lose that skill of critical thinking, which I believe we will lose when we over rely on AI,” says Smith.
A survey done by the Digital Education Council revealed that 86 percent of students globally are using AI in their studies, with 54 percent of them using AI on a weekly basis. The survey indicates that while students are regularly using AI, they feel undereducated about how to use it responsibly and wary of its effects on education in both learning and evaluating.
Smith doesn’t hide his use of AI and states he uses AI to create discussion questions for his classes, such as finding scenes from stories he can use to correlate with events from the class readings. However, he warns against not being well-versed in the texts used in class and relied on AI alone to make the proper connections.
“The likelihood of me grabbing something that would not pair well or would only be tenuous or a weak connection to the material would be high.”
This is why he encourages students to be well versed in the material they are giving to AI, in order to point out when you are being given bad information from AI. Smith also says that his class is structured to give students a way to effectively use AI in a responsible way that they will be able to bring with them in the outside world.
“You’ve had to sit down in a class for an hour and a half, you’ve had to think about subjects, you’ve had to write about them and put those ideas together and into words and onto paper,” Smith says. By dedicating class time to reading, thinking and writing without AI, he hopes students will learn how to use AI as a study resource rather than doing the work for them.
While the increased use of AI by students is alarming to many, on the other hand, professors such as Smith argues that AI may be helping students become well versed and responsible in how they use it. Still, the allure of convenience is hard to deny.
An anonymous student who is majoring in Physics says, “I use AI often, but mainly to understand how something works or how it is done.”
Although he said that AI can’t always be a substitute for learning, the students note that when he doesn’t understand a subject and turns to AI for help, it delivers a different way of solving the problem than originally shown by his professor, offering a different perspective. This presents the worry and cloncern of potential misinformation and artificial bias incoded within the AI models data base, or just overall confusion for students.
The student also admits, “Sometimes I just get lazy. If it’s like something I do not want to spend time on or I just really need it to be done, I will use AI.” In this way, AI acts as a sort of false security blanket students believe they fan fall back on as a last resort, which disincentivizes the learning process.
Faculty, of course, a r e not immune to the lure of AI convenience, especially when it comes to grading. “I don’t think that there is a lot of motivation even on the faculty end of things to do something proactive about AI,” Smith says. “They view it as like, well if I’m going to be overworked and underpaid, this is a good way to cut corners and shortcut.”
Which then is another debate within itself.
Smith continues to explain how in his head, “We’re going to lose critical thought. I mean, already, we’re at this phase in our society where you ask someone something. ‘What’s the weather gonna be like? How do I get to this place? How much is the new Nintendo Switch Two?’ And they tell you, ‘Google it,’ or ‘Ask Google” and I think within a few years, we’re gonna be in this place where it’s no longer Google, it’s, ‘Chat GPT it’” or ‘Ask Chat.” The interesting thing is, that future may be closer than we expect, it might already be here.