Michigan’s AI moment requires schools, communities and policymakers to lead together 

As Michigan heads into another school year, the debate over artificial intelligence is shifting. The question is no longer whether students will use AI. They already are. The question is what schools, families and communities are going to do about it.

We can spend the next several years trying to keep AI out of classrooms, or we can decide what students should learn to do with it, what they must still be able to do without it, and what responsible use should look like.

The wrong response is either panic or denial.

But first, we have to confront reality. AI did not invent academic dishonesty. Students found shortcuts long before generative AI arrived. I know because I was one of them. In the 1980s, I sometimes read CliffsNotes instead of the full book, and like plenty of students, I knew the odd-numbered answers were waiting in the back of the math textbook. Since then, students have continued to copy homework, trade answers, and search for ways to reduce the work. AI simply makes those shortcuts quicker, more personalized and far more difficult to detect.

Still, we need to be honest about what AI has exposed. If a student can turn an assignment over to AI and receive a passing product without reading, reasoning, revising, discussing or applying knowledge, we have a problem bigger than technology. We have designed an assignment that can be completed without learning.

Too much of school still treats a finished product as proof of understanding. A polished essay, completed worksheet, slide presentation or passing grade may look like learning. None of them, by themselves, proves that a student can think, explain, evaluate evidence or apply knowledge independently.

AI has made that weakness impossible to ignore.

A blanket ban will not solve it. Students will encounter AI in college, workplaces and daily life. If schools pretend the technology does not exist, students will still learn to use it, but without guidance about accuracy, bias, privacy, intellectual honesty or responsible judgment.

Michigan should expect more.

Students need AI literacy and the ability to use these tools, question them and know their limits. They need to understand that AI can fabricate sources, make factual errors, reinforce bias and produce writing that sounds polished while saying very little. They need practice verifying claims, protecting personal information, disclosing their use of AI and recognizing when a tool is helping them learn versus doing the learning for them.

That is not a new elective for a small group of technology students. It is becoming basic literacy and civic readiness.

It also requires schools to rethink assessment. The goal cannot be to turn teachers into detectives, chasing students through AI-detection software and trying to prove who wrote a sentence. The goal is to make student thinking visible.

Ask students to explain how they reached an answer. Have them annotate sources, defend claims in conversation, revise drafts, respond to feedback and apply learning in unfamiliar situations. Require them to show what they know, not merely submit something that looks complete.

AI can have a legitimate place in that process. A student might use it to generate several arguments about a historical event, then fact-check the results, identify errors, find credible sources and defend a conclusion. Another might use it for feedback on a draft, then explain which suggestions improved the work and which weakened it. Used responsibly, AI can support practice, translation, accessibility and timely feedback.

But it cannot be allowed to replace the thinking students need to develop.

Michigan has begun to provide a framework for responsible AI use in schools. Now the work cannot be left to a few technology directors, individual teachers or a policy buried in a student handbook. Communities, school boards and policymakers need to take the lead together, setting clear public expectations for student learning, privacy, equity and human judgment.

That responsibility extends beyond schools. AI depends on physical infrastructure, including data centers, energy and water, and Michigan communities are already wrestling with where that infrastructure belongs and what its impact should be. Those concerns deserve a real public voice, but simply opposing development is not a strategy.

If we intend to harness AI while other nations do the same, we also have a responsibility to determine how to build the infrastructure it requires responsibly and work across differences when the costs fall unfairly on particular communities. Without that capacity, our aspirations to lead AI and shape the values governing its use become a moot point.