In a classroom in Thailand, math teacher Humayra Mostafa noticed a strange thing: her carefully designed homework actually showed a lot of inconsistent answers. Although she used AI tools to check her own problem-solving process, the tool gave a completely different set of answers. It wasn't until that moment that she realized that AI did not make basic mathematical mistakes, but confused her questions with similar exercises from another source.

“When I assigned this assignment to the students,” she recalled, “I found that four students did the same thing and submitted the wrong assignment. At that moment, I suddenly realized that the students didn’t realize that AI would go wrong.”

Mostafa’s experience reveals a broader, growing change that is happening in the field of education: “bypass culture” is on the rise—students are increasingly leveraging AI tools to completely skip the learning process. Instead of trying to solve problems or develop their own expressions, they directly hand over the tasks to AI tools.

With AI, what is the meaning of learning?

Although many students are still submitting complete assignments on time, the critical thinking that should support these assignments is increasingly missing. The emergence of generative AI makes it unprecedentedly easy to create seemingly perfect answers, even if the learning process itself has been completely skipped.

“I think communication between teachers and students is very important so that students can understand the goals and meaning of learning,” Mostafa said. She has seven years of teaching experience and is currently working as a foreign teacher in Thailand. However, recently, she has begun to receive a new kind of student questions frequently: If AI can be completed, why should we still learn?

"Some students asked me directly: 'Since AI can calculate math problems, why do I still need to learn math?' Some students told me that their friends are using ChatGPT to complete their homework." In "Bypassing culture", AI has become a shortcut to alternative efforts, replacing thinking with automation.

More subtle problems arise at the second level. When asked to find information (for example: protein content of 100 grams of chicken), her students tend to rely on AI-generated summary and copy the information directly without checking the original source.

"Then they just searched on Google and saw the summary given by AI, and copied it down directly, without verifying the source at all," she said. The result is that the answer is wrong, and the students have no perception of the “why” behind the task, let alone lose the opportunity to exercise basic academic abilities—such as information assessment and judgment.

Learning still means absorbing new knowledge, but in the AI era, the speed and purpose of learning are quietly changing. Although AI speeds up the acquisition of information, it cannot replace the ability to distinguish between authenticity and falsehood. Because of this, forward-looking educators are actively involved in teaching students how to use AI tools with a critical awareness.

An illusion of accuracy

Mostafa was an early user of AI tools. "I intuitively realized that AI would be an efficient aid, and early adopters would have the advantage. So I started to learn as much as possible." But that experience of mismatch in AI answers became her turning point.

"I realized that AI's answer was based on a question that looked very similar (ChatGPT did not support uploading files at the time). The first few questions were the same, but the last three were different, resulting in the last three completely wrong answers."

Her students did what many are doing now: blindly trusting the first answer given by AI. Although this approach is efficient and convenient, it may not be accurate.

“That’s why students copy content directly from AI without verification and end up submitting the wrong assignment,” she said. “They don’t understand that the data can be biased, incomplete, and they don’t understand that AI generates false information. AI tools often rely on pattern recognition to respond to content, which can lead to wrong answers.”

Globally, teachers have observed similar phenomena: students are increasingly relying on AI to generate output, but no longer participating in the thinking process behind it. A recent article by Hua Hsu in The New Yorker pointed out that many students now rely on AI to summarize reading materials and even let them think on their own.

Because of this, teachers must let students understand that AI’s answers may sound confident, but they are not always correct. The key is whether students have the ability to judge their accuracy; without this ability, they are prone to mistaken fluency as real.

Teach AI literacy

The instinctive reaction of some academic circles is to strengthen supervision, upgrade testing tools, and formulate stricter rules. But Mostafa chose another path.

“I allow students to use AI freely and learn from it as a tool to improve the quality of their assignments,” she said, “because I hope they can adapt to the AI world that they will face in the future.”

“From my understanding, we have to be able to distinguish what is AI-generated content and what is human-created content,” she continued. “So software like GPTZero plays an important role in helping students use AI effectively, rather than blindly replicate.”

In her class, the goal is to develop discernment, not punishment. This means helping students understand the nature, how these tools work, and where they are limited.

“Students should learn to distinguish between human writing and AI-generated content,” she said, “this is to evaluate the credibility and stance of the information read.”

Recently, Mostafa discussed with students about a list of "50 Must-Reads for This Summer" - this article that later became popular was actually entirely generated by AI, and this incident itself became an excellent teaching opportunity.

“We had an open discussion,” she said. “The students came to the conclusion themselves without me intervention: the content had to be verified.”

It is this kind of conversation that has truly taken root in AI literacy. It goes beyond punitive rules and turns to reflective thinking, giving students confidence to question, evaluate, and challenge AI-generated content.

What can educators do?

So, what does all this mean for educators? To explore these issues, GPTZero recently held its first webinar series, "Responsible Use of AI Teaching". The series brings together teachers from different grades and disciplines to share how AI reshapes classroom interactions.

We explore how AI usage policies are clearly communicated in the syllabus and how students can be guided to use AI prudently rather than blindly. It was during this series of events that Humayra heard about the list of "50 books" that later became popular in AI, which prompted her to discuss the credibility of the source of information in class.

Several teachers in the GPTZero teaching network have begun embedding AI usage guides in the course introduction email ( click here to view the example). Instead of waiting for students to misuse AI, they proactively provide a framework for responsible use that helps students learn to consciously navigate these new tools from the very beginning.

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