OpenAI just launched ChatGPT for teachers. The question now is how much education we are willing to delegate to AI

What happens when a teacher uses artificial intelligence to prepare his classes, a student uses it to do homework, and finally, that same teacher uses AI again to correct them? It may not be the norm yetbut that scenario no longer sounds so far away. The speed at which these tools have been integrated into classrooms has opened a fundamental debate: what do we really learn if we let technology do the work for us? And what does the educational system lose if this process becomes a habit?

The landing of AI in education is neither coincidental nor recent. Technological tools have been present in classrooms for years, with platforms such as Google Classroom either Moodle. The novelty is not in using technology, but in relying on systems capable of generating content, proposing solutions or even being used in pedagogical decisions. That is where the big developers—Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and, more recently, OpenAI—have decided to go a step further and position themselves at the center of the educational debate.

Here OpenAI lands with a dedicated proposal for teachers in the United States. We are talking about a version of ChatGPT Designed for primary and secondary educators, free for verified teachers, with administrative controls for centers and school districts. Unlike the service that almost all of us know, OpenAI ensures that the data generated in these environments will not be used, by default, to train its models.

What ChatGPT offers for teachers

• Personalized assistance. It allows you to enter school level, curriculum and desired format so that the answers adapt to the real style of the classroom. It is the teacher who controls that configuration.
• Integration with usual resources. You can generate presentations with Canva, import lesson plans or documents from Google Drive and Microsoft 365, and start a conversation with that context already activated.
• Ideas from other teachers. Show real examples of teachers already using ChatGPT in their classes, directly below the editor, as a source of inspiration.
• Teaching collaboration. It makes it easy to create custom GPTs and shared templates to plan units, lessons, or assessments among colleagues in the same school or district.
• Management from the center. It offers a manageable workspace, with secure accounts and differentiated roles for teachers and academic leaders.

What is OpenAI pursuing with this?

Among the 800 million weekly ChatGPT users there are many teachers. The company explains that they are using the tool to design teaching units, adapt the curriculum to regional standards or generate examples that help evaluate their students. Let’s look at some of the usage examples you have shared:

Generate examples for a task

You are an expert English teacher. Using the prompts in the accompanying readings, generate seven different sample answers.

Responses should be one paragraph in length and range in quality from very well written to very poor. They must be written following the RACES format (restate, respond, cite, explain and summarize). Include a justification for each answer, indicating your level of writing.

Plan a multi-week drive

My science department is redesigning the 8th grade physical science curriculum and I need help creating a teaching unit based on the attached objectives. Please make a plan for a 20-day unit with 55-minute classes. I need a guiding question for each day to help focus learning. Provide hands-on activities for students to explore these topics.

As we can see, AI is here to stay, and trying to ignore it is not an option. The real question is how to use it without replacing the act of learning, which is much more than completing a task. Because if the teacher uses AI to solve what he has to prepare, and the student does the same to deliver what is required of him, what remains of that process beyond compliance? The educational system is not based on the ability to deliver results, but on the ability to think, make mistakes and argue with one’s own knowledge.

An MIT study provides data that begins to illuminate the debate: users who wrote essays with ChatGPT produced the text 60% faster, but their cognitive effort was relevant was reduced by 32%. That is, they achieve a more polished result, but with less mental work. Another study, in this case from the SBS Swiss Business Schoolnotes that the increased use of AI is linked to the deterioration of critical thinking skills.

We still do not know what effects this dynamic will have in the medium or long term. What we do know is that the classroom has become a territory where big technology companies want to be. And that the real educational challenge of the next decade will not be deciding whether we use AI, but deciding how much of the educational process we are willing to delegate to it.

Images | Xataka with Gemini 3 | OpenAI

In Xataka | The problem is not that the AI ​​is not able to read the time. The problem is confirming that he does not reason and only repeats what he has seen.