ChatEDU – The AI & Education Podcast

In this ChatEDU Check-In: How People Are Actually Using AI in 2026, Matt explores a rigorous study analyzing thousands of real-world examples to reveal a massive shift towards personal and professional support. The data tracks over 12,000 use cases across platforms like Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube to capture how people actually interact with AI in their daily lives.

Key Takeaways:
Individuals increasingly rely on AI for core human thinking, risking mental laziness and the erosion of independent thought when algorithms handle tasks from the very start.

Therapeutic and companion interactions have become the single highest-ranked use case, with users forming deep emotional bonds and anthropomorphizing chatbots to navigate personal hardships.

Significant "shadow usage" is occurring in the workplace, where employees secretly build AI workflows to bypass institutional hurdles and complete tasks faster without leadership's knowledge.

Matt’s Two Cents: School leaders need to look closely at how automation impacts cognitive engagement, shifting the focus from simply offloading clerical tasks to using AI intentionally as a colleague or coach that grows skills. Furthermore, the rise of emotional reliance on chatbots and undetected "shadow usage" highlights a critical gap between institutional governance and real-world behavior, signaling that districts must address the human and hidden dimensions of tech adoption.

Article:
How People Are Really Using AI in 2026
https://bit.ly/4ftzkoN

In this ChatEDU Check-In: How to fight brain rot at school?, Matt explores Estonia's nationwide launch of a customized, Socratic version of ChatGPT for 20,000 high school students. Despite wide access, early data shows that only 35 percent of eligible students consistently use the system, which is designed to guide learning rather than provide direct answers.

Key Takeaways:
Estonia's school-sanctioned chatbot uses a restrictive Socratic framework, but only about a third of students use it regularly.

Students are actively developing workarounds, using repetitive prompting or switching to unfiltered commercial AI tools to avoid the frustrating conversational guardrails of the school system.

A vocal minority of students are staging a boycott of the technology due to environmental concerns over data centers and geopolitical skepticism regarding the dominance of American tech firms.

Matt’s Two Cents: This story is less about the technology itself and more about enterprise organizational development and how to deploy tech at scale. For top-down, nationwide educational technology implementations to succeed, schools must move away from rigid, forced rollouts and instead allow administrators, teachers, and students to collaborate on how to best leverage the tool.

Article:
How to Fight AI Brain Rot at School? For One Country, It’s With Free ChatGPT
https://bit.ly/4fsflqv

In this episode of ChatEDU AI on the Sidelines, Near Real-Time Coaching for Every Educator, open with the "Sad Wives of AI," a Wired piece on the marital strain and household gender gaps emerging as Bay Area tech husbands pour themselves into the AI wave.

The Rundown

Google has introduced automatic Google Drive syncing for NotebookLM, eliminating the need to manually update uploaded Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

Upgrading to Gemini 1.5 Pro transformed NotebookLM's image upload capabilities into full multimodal visual understanding, opening up new use cases for students and teachers using screenshots and real world photos.

A roundup of recent AI failures: a $100 million Pizza Hut franchisee lawsuit against Dragon Tail AI, Starbucks scrapping a faulty AI inventory tool, a study finding 60%+ of AI search responses inaccurate, and fake journals publishing AI papers.

A Wall Street Journal report highlights how persistent memory features in major chatbots can backfire by latching onto stale, outdated, or sensitive personal data and skewing future advice.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten introduced a 10 plan calling for a complete ban on screens for preschool through second grade and a prohibition on student facing AI in all elementary schools.

The School Superintendents Association is pairing 50 superintendents with 100 students to collaborate with MIT experts and draft a student led national AI policy for public schools.

Students from New Haven's Engineering and Science University Magnet School developed a functioning visual prosthesis utilizing advanced vision language models for real time hazard detection for the visually impaired.

The Beneath the Surface

Matt and Liz explore Urban Assembly's Project CAFE, which delivers near-real-time coaching to every educator. CEO David Adams joins to discuss using AI-driven frameworks to improve teacher development, student engagement, and AI integration in K-12 classrooms.

https://www.urbanassembly.org/

https://www.urbanassembly.org/what-we-do/project-cafe

The Bright Byte

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's Biohub is an open-source world model of protein biology that predicts complex protein shapes in seconds and designs disease-targeting proteins in days. Being fully open source, it lets researchers worldwide download the data and accelerate breakthroughs on their own.

Announcements

Purchase Learning They'll Love - Dr. Elizabeth Radday
Amazon - https://tinyurl.com/22t9hz77

Seeing through the Machine – Teaching Bias as an Equity Practice in AI - Dr. Elizabeth Radday - https://tinyurl.com/4ybwkn7a

Check out our middle / high school Student AI Literacy course - ​​⁠⁠⁠www.skills21.org/ai/learnai⁠⁠⁠ 

Explore Skills21’s FREE social media literacy curriculum - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.skills21.org/social-balance⁠⁠⁠

Address Screen Time concerns - ⁠skills21.org/ai/screenshift⁠ 

Links

Meet the Sad Wives of AI
https://tinyurl.com/mr4xf8ze

Automatic Drive syncing in NotebookLM
https://tinyurl.com/38kfana4

Unlocking NotebookLM's best feature
https://tinyurl.com/3ppt3ccz

Pizza Hut franchisee says AI caused $100M in damages
https://tinyurl.com/5ypp52ua

Exclusive: Starbucks scraps AI inventory tool across North America
https://tinyurl.com/5a68wphd

AI Just Isn’t Right
https://tinyurl.com/33ve2p6u

Fake journals publish AI papers under professors' names
https://tinyurl.com/3tbf5rpb

Your Chatbot's Long Memory Isn't Always a Good Thing
https://tinyurl.com/4dzpb77n

AFT president urges screen and AI bans for young students
https://tinyurl.com/tu56kxc9

Let Digital-Native Students Lead the AI Revolution in Education
https://tinyurl.com/y589exk8

New Haven Magnet School Is Only High School Team at Yale Innovation Summit
https://tinyurl.com/mr352pte

A World Model of Protein Biology
https://tinyurl.com/5ca6upk2

In this ChatEDU Check-In: Catch Up Crisis, Liz explores how artificial intelligence can help address the widespread failure of American schools to effectively help struggling students catch up. Grade inflation and the removal of standardized testing requirements are masking major learning gaps, leaving many students unprepared for higher education despite having high grade-point average.

Key Takeaways:
A significant disconnect exists between high student grades and actual academic proficiency, creating a deceptive reality for parents and students.

Traditional school systems are largely failing to move struggling students toward academic recovery due to the overwhelming demands placed on teachers.

AI tools can analyze student work in real time to identify specific learning misconceptions, serving as a scalable playbook for targeted teacher interventions.

Liz’s Two Cents: School leaders must confront the uncomfortable reality that grade inflation is masking critical student deficiencies. To prevent students from falling permanently behind, districts should strategically leverage AI to surface real-time diagnostic insights, allowing teachers to maximize their limited intervention time by targeting exact learning gaps rather than relearning mastered content.

Article:
America’s Schools Are Terrible at Catching Kids Up. How AI Can Help
https://bit.ly/4u8cuGQ

In this ChatEDU Check-In: AI Labs Hiring Philosophers, Liz explores why leading artificial intelligence labs like Google DeepMind and Anthropic have begun hiring in-house philosophers. This shift turns abstract questions about the nature of intelligence into practical guidelines for model behavior.

Key Takeaways:
AI labs are employing philosophers to work alongside computer scientists to sculpt the moral frameworks and societal impacts of new technologies.

These professionals focus on technical value alignment and drafting "constitutions" to guide model interactions in sensitive scenarios, such as managing users in distress.

Academic critics worry these corporate roles may limit critical questioning and could be used for "ethics washing" to signal public safety while prioritizing shareholders.

Liz’s Two Cents: The influx of philosophers into AI development raises critical questions about whose ethical frameworks are being prioritized and whether these roles are genuinely impactful or merely a public relations strategy. For school districts, this underscores the importance of teaching students to critically evaluate the underlying values and potential biases embedded within the AI tools they use daily.

Article:
To Land a Job in AI, Try Reading Kant
https://bit.ly/4aogUCm