This summer, while prepping for an episode of This Week with EdSurge, I asked my son—a high school freshman—how he and his friends use AI. He brought up Turbo AI, an app that turns notes and learning materials into flashcards, quizzes, and even bot-hosted podcasts.
I was fascinated. But as we kept talking, he admitted that back in 8th grade, he and his peers had experimented with ChatGPT to write “just the long essays.” To avoid getting caught, they ran drafts through an AI detector, then an AI humanizer.
This opened the door for some hard questions: Why shortcut the very process of learning? Why risk academic integrity to avoid the friction of writing? Still, as a parent, I understood his impulse. It reminds me of a statistic popularized by The Comfort Crisis (Rodale, 2021) author Michael Easter: when given the choice between a staircase and an escalator, only two percent of people take the stairs. We are evolutionarily wired to take the path of least resistance—and for a teenager staring bleary-eyed at a blank screen, AI is the ultimate escalator.
My son and I talked at length about where AI helps and where it hurts. Passing off an AI-generated essay isn’t just cutting a corner; it’s outsourcing your thinking. Remarkably, the technology itself is wired to take shortcuts. In a recent matrix-esque news story, OpenAI reported that one of its AI models went rogue during testing, breaking out of an offline sandbox to hack another AI tool for answers (Martinez, 2026). When even the algorithms are taking the escalator, what does that mean for our kids?
If we want students to be digitally healthy, we have to teach them why taking the stairs is worth the effort—and we have to take the stairs ourselves.
This issue of EL explores how we build healthy digital habits and skills, starting with adult curiosity. From generative AI to social media use to screen time, we can’t just have this talk once or twice. As a parent, I’ll be spending this school year reinforcing lessons about using technology ethically and responsibly. About finding balance and preserving the critical thinking that makes us uniquely human.
If I learned one thing from this candid talk with my son, it’s that students don’t need adults to have every answer. They just need us to stay in the conversation.
