A Manifesto for Symbiotic, Modality-Aware AI in Education

Introduction: This Is Not a Drill

Academics, it’s time to stop clutching pearls and start building cathedrals.

This manifesto is both a charge and a challenge

• To educators: Stop fretting that AI will replace you. Instead, start using it to teach in ways you never could before. Increase the leverage it provides for education and adapt rather than trying to ban it, threaten students who use it, or, equally, just give in to the inevitable and let students do what they want.
• To developers (yes, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, Anthropic — this means you): Stop shipping shiny LLMs one after the other that answer questions in one voice and one tone for all humans. Yes, the rapid increase in analogous IQ is impressive, but it’s time to design AIs that actually teach like a great teacher would.

Today’s LLMs are dazzling, no doubt. I’ve had more meaningful questions with Grok and ChatGPT in recent days than with humans, and I am loving it. But they can reason like monologue machines — linear, inflexible, and oblivious to how different people actually learn. This is fine for trivia night. It is not fine for a classroom.

We want something more: LLMs that teach like the best of us can. Differently. Messily. With…