Developing Student Agency With AI Tool Use

Students are starting to build the new world

The growing capabilities of AI “tools” can be overwhelming. Many have not yet even used the current AIs to anywhere close to the capabilities of the AIs, and we are expecting ChatGPT5, Grok4, which may reach the 45 percentile in Humanity’s Last Exam, and new upgrades from Claude and Gemini.

Yesterday, Logan Kilpatrick, the Head of Product for Google AI Studio and the Gemini API tweeted:

Progress is rapid and given that AI is now making significant contributions to the coding that is leading to AI advances, this is not surprising.

But where does it leave everyone? While AI replacing human employees is not widespread, it is starting to happen.

Entry level jobs are getting harder to find. Some of our graduates are struggling.

Microsoft even told its most recently laid off employees (9,000) to seek consolation from an AI chatbot. The world seems to be getting callous, if not cruel.

This is likely to get worse, as more and more jobs can be done with AIs and most people won’t know how to use the tools. This could create dysutopian scenarios.

But the more we can empower by helping them use the tools, the better.

There was a good article in yeterday’s Wall Street Journal about how “high agency” people using the tools are thriving.

But many people don’t just come “high agency.” They need to be

Taught to use the tools
Encouraged to use the tools
Coached
Inspired
Encouraged to develop good taste and opinions
Expected to do more

They certainly don’t need to be assigned a stack of papers AI can write better than them, called cheaters, and scanned through AI detectors in hopes that faculty don’t have to change their assessments.

If we want to help our students, we need to empower them to thrive in an AI World.

They’ll even make some money quite young.

AI is starting to change the world.

Education is largely resisting, with most institutions only making modest changes. I suspect this will continue in 2025-6, but the dam is starting to break.

Institutions that don’t make radical changes by 2026-7 will (start to) lose relevancy.