ChatGPT has turned many classrooms into a digital battlefield. The teachers build higher walls: “pencil and paper tests!” to stop cheating while students learn new tricks to pass detection : “sounds ‘more human”. Meanwhile, AI’s impact on the world has shifted from “if” to “how fast.” It’s time we teach Applied Intelligence.
It’s been three years since ChatGPT was unleashed on the world, and many classrooms look like a digital game of cat-and-mouse.
Teachers reinforce their fences with bubble sheets, perfectly straight edges that only machines could produce. Students fine-tune their tapes, flags, and learn how to remove weird lines/characters in their essays.
But while we’ve been busy playing this wearisome game of gotcha, the world has left us in the dust.
A recent 2025 study (Brynjolfsson et al.) found a significant decline in employment for early-career workers in AI-exposed roles. The “clerk work” we often assign in schools such as summarizing, basic reporting, and low-level analysis, is exactly what the market is automating.
If we want our students to be the drivers of this technology rather than its passengers, we need to stop talking about “using” AI and start talking about Applied Intelligence.
What is Applied Intelligence?
Applied Intelligence is human empathy meeting machine efficiency. Instead of asking a chatbot a question, students are taught how to use AI as a collaborator to solve complex problems.
Problems with no clear answer or “correct” output.
Problems rooted in genuine human need.
We are already seeing amazing breakthroughs from students when we give them the autonomy to build, not just consume:
Students in Arkansas didn’t just learn how to “use” machine learning. They built their own AI powered app to detect oral cancer in rural communities where dentist aren’t prevalent. Students in Minnesota prototyped their own device + mobile app that detects ice thickness to prevent the hundreds of accidental deaths that occur each year when unknowing patrons fall through weakened ice. Students in Massachusetts engineered KineX, their own AI powered physical therapy app that uses your phone’s camera to analyze patient exercises and expedite home recovery.
Students aren’t simply writing AI “prompts.” They’re identifying problems faced by humans and using machines to solve them.
The New Literacy: “Vibe Coding” and System Design
As many educators have discovered over the past year, coding is no longer the barrier it once was. Thanks to “vibe coding” (building software using plain English), any student can hack together a prototype that recognizes their “solution.” The new literacy isn’t Python or Java. It’s System Design.
When a student teaches themselves how to code their own “Growth Spurt” tutor bot, they’ll have to tackle questions like…
- What “rules” does my AI need to follow?
- How do I systematize rules to prevent hallucinations?
- How can I create guardrails to prevent my AI from simply searching for the answer?
This is high-level critical thinking. Beautiful problems for students to unpack that happens to use technology as a scaffold.
The Human-AI Division of Labor
We must teach students to lean into what AI does well so they can focus on what only humans can do. In order to solve “messy” problems, students will have to learn how to lean into what AI excels at…so they can focus on what humans do best.
The AI’s Task: Sifting through millions of data points to identify specific patterns. Scanning through historical journals to identify linguistic trends. Screening hundreds of medical patients to determine trial eligibility.
The Human’s Task:Interpreting the significance of those patterns. Interviewing tribal elders about their history. Applying human empathy to analyze the data.
The future of education is not whether we should teach AI, it’s how. Students are already using AI outside of the classroom. If we want them to learn how to drive this technology versus be driven by it. We have to teach them how to use AI intelligently.
The REAL question is…
Are we preparing students to be architects of the future or are we just teaching them to hide their prompts?