AI as Your Assistant, Not Your Replacement

With AI tools flooding the education space, it's essential to remember that AI is just a tool. It can support your work as an educator, but it shouldn't do the work for you. Let me explain. 

If you have ever tried to teach from someone else's slides, then you know how hard, if not nearly impossible, it can be. It can feel awkward and unnatural because you are trying to navigate work that is not yours. And quite commonly, students pick up on it. 

It's fine to use someone else's slides as a resource to help you develop your own, and it's important that you make the information your own. This means you decide the content and how you want to teach it, based on your knowledge, experience, and perspective. This is how you incorporate "you" into the lecture and bring it to life. 

We each have our own unique process and approach to preparing content and slides for a presentation. The work of reviewing, researching, culling, and organizing the information serves to prepare and ready us for the presentation. It sets the material in our minds and reinforces our knowledge. In the process, we may uncover a clinical experience or two to share that emphasizes the content. 

I know it can be tempting, given how busy PA faculty are. I know there is a growing number of articles and support available to have AI create your lectures. However, I must raise a flag of concern. 

The importance of creating your presentation first can't be overlooked. By doing so, you engage and continue to develop the knowledge, essential skills, and tools of an educator. These are the components, along with the roles and responsibilities that make up the science, art, and heart of teaching. This is the human piece that AI cannot provide. 

Can AI create a content-rich presentation that follows established guidelines for effective formatting? Yes. However, you still need to verify that the content information is accurate at the desired level, including what is required from both a PA and a human perspective. Often, it's faster to start from scratch than to fix a presentation made by someone or something else. 

With that said, once you have created your draft presentation, AI can help you refine it from the standpoint of ensuring it is presentation format effective. You can have AI review it with specific instructions to provide suggestions and feedback for ways to make the presentation as compelling and engaging as possible. Then you decide whether you accept those suggestions or not. AI can help you learn by illuminating or showing you things you didn't know or hadn't considered. This, in turn, expands your knowledge base and skills as an educator. It could be like having your own mentor. 

However, please don't assume that just because AI suggested something, it is correct. The more you use AI, the more you will start to see some mistakes. In my own experience, I have actually called out AI's errors, and it has graciously acknowledged them. An educator's role is to review and ensure the accuracy of information before it is shared with students. 

The other critical point is that AI can't teach for you. It cannot get up in front of a class of students and look them in the eye, or give them a high five when they answer or ask a question. It can't rest a reassuring hand on a student's shoulder who is struggling, but is so close to a breakthrough. AI does not have your knowledge or lived experience. It lacks your perspective and unique teaching style. There is no human, no wizard behind the curtain, even if it has a human name. Don't get me wrong, it does its job very well, sometimes frighteningly so, but it is crucial to remember that its job is to search, collect, and analyze data, and then present it. And it is definitely frightening how fast it does it. However, it does not distinguish between accurate and inaccurate, or credible and non-credible sources. That is your job, the human. AI is not flawless.   

I have been around long enough to witness many new digital and web-based technologies emerge in education. The key, as with any tool, is to use it with intention, which is a human quality. Intention refers to something that you want and plan to do, or an aim. It is a mental state in which a person commits themselves to a course of action for a specific purpose or goal. For example, teaching students about heart disease from the perspective of their role as a physician assistant/associate on the healthcare team. 

As a little experiment, I asked AI if it was capable of intention. This was its reply. 

       Great question—and a deep one.

       Short answer: No, AI is not currently capable of intention in the way humans are. 

It's a bit unnerving that it said not "currently" capable. But that's a discussion for another time. 

One last point on my campaign to encourage you to keep developing and creating your own lectures. The students. 

If you've been following the introduction of AI into education, just 18 months ago, the primary concern was how we, as educators, could ensure that students weren't using AI to complete their assignments or submit work that wasn't theirs. However, we have now hit a new speed bump. It is certainly not uncommon when new technology is introduced to education. 

If you haven't noticed, students generally have no problem speaking up when they don't like something or disagree with the way things are done. It was only a matter of time before that attitude hit AI. 

According to an article in The New York Times, a senior student at Northeastern University demanded a refund of her tuition (Hill, 2024, May 14). Why? She noticed that her professor used AI to create lecture slides without disclosure. Additionally, faculty members are seeing comments on course evaluations complaining about faculty members using AI—their argument. Students are paying a lot of money to be taught by humans, not AI. 

The important message again is that AI is a useful and helpful tool, but there are certain things for which it should not be used. I believe it is important to remember that we are role models. It is our responsibility to demonstrate and embody behaviors and practices that we want to see and foster in our students. One of these is how to effectively and appropriately utilize the tool of AI to support one's work, rather than doing it for them. It has been my experience that students don't appreciate a double standard or at least something that feels like one. If we are going to define when and how they can use it, then we need to be mindful of that ourselves. Actions still speak louder than words and tend to have a greater impact.

In my humble opinion, and as someone who has dedicated my life to teaching and education, AI should not be writing your lectures from a prompt. That task belongs to you—the educator, the expert, the human being in the room. It robs you of the opportunity to expand and deepen your skills as a faculty member. I do believe it can be used to review and provide suggestions and feedback, as I wrote in my last piece. And it needs to be used with intention and oversight. 

Check out McMurtie's piece on Teaching with AI (see below). She presents several ways AI is being used as a tool by faculty members after attending the Teaching and Learning with AI conference.   

Resources

Hill, K. (2025, May 14). The professors are using ChatGPT, and some students aren't happy about it. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/technology/chatgpt-college-professors.html  

McMurtie, B. (2025, June 5). Teaching with AI. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/teaching/2025-06-05?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_13761949_nl_Teaching_date_20250605&sra=true