I recently had the pleasure of participating in Digital Promise‘s inaugural AI Education Exchange “Ask Me Anything” series, hosted by Kelly McNeil. This was my first LinkedIn AMA and was great fun, in large part due to the team that helped set it up and the broader community that raised a wide array of critical questions about AI and its possible role in education.

We covered a lot of ground in this hour-long chat, most of which would not be news to people who follow my work. When exploring the nature of GenAI itself, I shared my favorite metaphor – that GenAI is like having a “smart, drunk, biased, supremely confident, always available intern.” This metaphor captures both the remarkable capabilities and inherent limitations of these systems, particularly their tendency to hallucinate (which, I argued, is not a bug but a feature fundamental to how they work).

TPACK came up in our conversation (of course it did!) and I shared some thoughts about how it takes on new dimensions in the age of AI. For the first time, we’re dealing with a technology that exhibits agentic behavior – it can engage in dialogue, adapt responses, and create an illusion of understanding that poses both opportunities and challenges for education and educators.

A significant portion of our conversation centered on something that I have been paying a lot of attention to these days: the broader societal implications of AI in education. Drawing parallels to how earlier technologies like film and social media transformed society, I emphasized the importance of considering not just how AI might change classroom practices, but how it will reshape the world within which our classrooms exist. This includes concerns about parasocial relationships, beauty bias, and the potential for manipulation.

Perhaps most crucially, we explored the need to move beyond simple media literacy toward a deeper understanding of human cognition and our own biases. As I noted during the session, many of our concerns about AI are actually concerns about how these technologies interact with our inherent cognitive tendencies and societal structures.

The video of the conversation is given below