Build don’t police

This morning I saw an advertisement for a school-based AI program. The topic of the training? AI and Plagiarism.

Now, plagiarism is a real concern — but framing an entire AI training around it is a textbook example of a false dilemma (also called a false binary). It reduces a complex, transformative tool to a single disciplinary issue, as if the only meaningful conversation about AI in education is whether students will cheat with it.

In a recent article, “Taming the AI Tools — Education First, Technology Second” (published in Theory into Practice), authors Leslie Loble and Kelly Stephens describe the AI-in-education conversation as stuck between two unhelpful extremes: AI will transform everything immediately vs. AI is unreliable hype that will collapse. They argue that educators should step out of that whiplash and anchor decisions in educational research and pedagogy — treating AI as something to be intentionally integrated to support teaching and learning, not as the driver of what schools do.

The plagiarism-centered training I saw this morning is a perfect example of this problem.

Here’s the thing: if you don’t want students to plagiarize, stop creating assignments that invite plagiarism. That’s not an AI problem — that’s a lesson design problem. This needs a reframe. Imagine you’re an educator with one professional development session to attend. Would you rather learn how to use AI to open up new possibilities for student creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking — or spend that time learning how to build enforcement tools to catch cheaters? That choice tells you everything about where our priorities should be.

And before the “So you don’t think plagiarism is important?” crowd arrives — that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that if your assignment can be easily completed by copying and pasting from any source — AI or otherwise — the real question isn’t about the tool. The real question is: What level of rigor is your assignment built on?

Just today, I worked with students on an AI writing lesson that they created. They incorporated elements of literature into original stories, then used AI to help develop the images for their narratives. That single lesson taught design thinking, stimulated curiosity, and called for collaboration — all without a single conversation about plagiarism, because the assignment made plagiarism irrelevant.

Project-based learning is sound pedagogy. Using AI to assist students in creating, building, and thinking critically is where the real work lives. Time spent training teachers to use AI effectively is time far better spent than time spent training teachers to police it.

So let me ask you this: Are your AI training sessions teaching educators to build, or just teaching them to fear?