Why go to class when you can just horse around?

404 Media has another excellent article on AI and education. This time, programs that can allegedly be the student while the student eats grass and frolics in a field.

There’s a new agentic AI called Einstein that will, according to its developers, live the life of a student for them. Einstein’s 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.

Educators 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.

If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I’d argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

There are a number of problems with this comparison, including a failure to consider what happened to the horses. But is the sort of thinking common to people whose entire personality is Fathoms deep in their own ass because they got into an elite college.

Paliwal 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. “The 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,” he said.

But will this program do what it says on the box? That’s the wrong question, according to people who think about such things and try to do something about them.

Kirschenbaum teaches English at the University of Virginia and has written at length about artificial intelligence. He’s 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’t the first agentic AI to do the work of a student for them, it’s just one that got attention online recently. Kirschenbaum and his fellow committee members flagged their concerns about these AIs in October, 2025.

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Kirschenbaum said that programs like Einstein are the inevitable conclusion of viewing higher education as a certification and transactive process. “What we’re finding is that if forms of education can be transacted then we’ve just about arrived at the point where autonomous software AI agents are capable of performing the transaction on your behalf,” he said. “And so the whole educational paradigm has come back to essentially bite itself in the ass.”

Read the whole thing. And you won’t regret subscribing, or at least signing up for 404 Media’s free emails.

From Inside Higher Ed.

For this reason, it is my view that we should be looking at the current challenges as a “demand-side” problem. It is now trivial for students to outsource their schoolwork to an AI model or agent. The chief innovation of Einstein—if it works—is eliminating the need to cut and paste LLM outputs. The only way to get students to learn is to make learning a more meaningful and attractive proposition than outsourcing the earning of a credential to a bot.

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We know what learning looks like—pretty much the opposite of Einstein—but as a system, we haven’t been as focused on learning as we could have been. Each of these occurrences should be viewed as an occasion to consider what learning really looks like and how what we ask students to do in class supports that learning.

From the 404 article, another possible solution is to remind students that having a bot write your papers for you is the same as paying someone to write your papers for you and will have the same consequences.

Mills is not a luddite. She’s 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. “This 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,” she said. “And yet that’s not obvious to us. It seems like it’s just another tool, right? But it’s not.”

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