There\u2019s a new agentic AI called Einstein that will, according to its developers, live the life of a student for them. Einstein\u2019s website claims that the AI will attend lectures for you, write your papers, and even log into EdTech platforms like Canvas to take tests and participate in discussions.\u00a0Educators told me that Einstein is just one of many AI tools that can do homework for students, but should be seen as a warning to schools that are increasingly seen by students as a place to gain a diploma and status as opposed to the value of education itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If an AI can go to school for you what\u2019s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn\u2019t one. \u201cI think about horses,\u201d he said. \u201cThey used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I’d argue horses became a lot more free,\u201d he said. \u201cThey can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said \u2018no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.\u2019\u201dBut humans aren\u2019t horses. \u201cThis is much bigger than Einstein,\u201d Matthew Kirschenbaum told 404 Media. \u201cEinstein is symptomatic. I doubt we\u2019ll be talking about Einstein, as such, in a year. But it\u2019s symptomatic of what\u2019s about to descend on higher ed and secondary ed as well.\u201dKirschenbaum teaches English at the University of Virginia and has written at length about artificial intelligence. He\u2019s also a member of the Modern Language Association (MLA) where he serves as member of its Task Force on AI Research and Teaching. Einstein isn\u2019t the first agentic AI to do the work of a student for them, it\u2019s just one that got attention online recently. Kirschenbaum and his fellow committee members flagged their concerns about these AIs in October, 2025.\u201cAgentic browsers are becoming widely available to the public. These offer AI \u2018agents\u2019 that can navigate [learning management systems] and complete assignments without any student involvement,\u201d the MLA\u2019s statement from October said. \u201cThe recent and hasty integration of generative AI features into those systems is already redefining student and instructor relationships, evaluative standards, and instructional outcomes\u2014with no compelling evidence that any of it is for the better.\u201dThe statement called on educators, lawmakers, and learning management system providers like Canvas, too cooperate in order to give academic institutions the abilities to block AI agents like Einstein.\u00a0Canvas did not respond to a request for comment.\u00a0Einstein is explicit in its pitch: it will log into Canvas (one of the most popular and ubiquitous pieces of education software) and do your classwork for you, just like Kirschenbaum and his fellows warned about last year.The attractiveness of agentic AIs is a symptom of a decades-long trend in higher education.\u00a0 \u201cUniviristies\u2026by and large adopted a transactive model of education,\u201d Kirschenbaum said. \u201cStudents see their diploma as a credential. They pay tuition and at the end of four years, sometimes five years, they receive the credential and, in theory at least, that is then the springboard to economic stability and prosperity.\u201dPaliwal seems to agree. He told 404 Media that he attempted to change the university from the inside while working as a TA, but felt stymied by politics. \u201cThe only way to force these institutions to evolve is to bring reality to their face. And usually the loudest critics are the ones who can’t do their own job well and live in fear of automation,\u201d he said.For Paliwal, agentic AIs are a method of freeing people from the labor of education. \u201cI think we really need to question what learning even is and whether traditional educational institutions are actually helping or harming us,\u201d he said. \u201cWe’re seeing a rise in unemployment across degree holders because of AI, and that makes me question whether this is really what humans are born to do. We’ve been brainwashed as a society into valuing ourselves by the output of our productive work, and I think humanity is a lot more beautiful than that. Is it really education if we’re just memorizing things to perform a task well?\u201dKirschenbaum said that programs like Einstein are the inevitable conclusion of viewing higher education as a certification and transactive process. \u201cWhat we\u2019re finding is that if forms of education can be transacted then we\u2019ve just about arrived at the point where autonomous software AI agents are capable of performing the transaction on your behalf,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so the whole educational paradigm has come back to essentially bite itself in the ass.\u201dHe said that one solution he\u2019s seen work is to retreat from devices entirely in the classroom. \u201cColleagues who have done it report that students are almost universally grateful. They understand the reasoning. They understand the logic,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd they appreciate the opportunity to be freed from the phones and the screens and to focus and engage with other people in a meaningful dialogue.\u201dBut the abandonment of EdTech platforms and screens won\u2019t work for every student. Anna Mills, an English professor at the College of Marin and a colleague of Kirschenbaum\u2019s on the MLA AI task force, compared the fight against agentic AI in education to cybersecurity. \u201cWe could decide that bots need to be labeled as bots and that we need to be able to distinguish human activity from AI activity online in some circumstances and that we want to build infrastructure for that,\u201d she said. \u201cThat would be an ongoing project, as cybersecurity is.\u201dMills is not a luddite. She\u2019s an expert in artificial intelligence systems as well as English, frequently uses Claude, and has been documenting the rise of agentic AIs in EdTech on her YouTube channel for months. She said that using agentic AI like Einstein was cheating, full stop, and academic fraud. \u201cThis is in direct violation of these foundational agreements that we make in order to use technology for human communication, human exchange, and human work online,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd yet that\u2019s not obvious to us. It seems like it\u2019s just another tool, right? But it\u2019s not.\u201dMills said she understands Paliwal\u2019s frustrations with education. \u201cBut what you need to understand is that online learning spaces are critical for students to access any kind of education,\u201d she said. For her, the proliferation of tools like Einstein do more than help a student bypass the labor of the classroom. They poison the educational well. Online learning has been a boon to many kinds of non-traditional students and that the rise of agentic AI is a threat to that not just because it trivializes traditional forms of education, but because it hurts the credibility of EdTech itself and other online platforms.The vast majority of college students aren\u2019t attending Ivy League schools, they\u2019re grinding away at night classes in community colleges across the country. Distance and online learning has been an enormous boon for those students. \u201cIf there\u2019s no credibility to that, then you\u2019ve just ruined the investment and the learning goals and the access to meaningful learning that that they can then also use for employment of students who are underprivileged, who can\u2019t come to the classroom, who are working full time and raising families and trying to get an education,\u201d Mills said.Students aren\u2019t horses and there is no greater freedom they can buy themselves by using AI tools to cheat in the classroom. And worse, the more these tools proliferate, the more suspect the entire enterprise becomes. It\u2019s one thing to cheat yourself out of an education, it\u2019s quite another to muddy the waters of EdTech platforms and online learning for everyone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"