The creator of the AI agent “Einstein” wants to free humans from the burden of academic labor. Critics say that misses the point of education entirely.#News #AI
What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?
There’s a new agentic AI called Einstein that will, according to its developers, live the life of a student for them. Einstein’s website claims that the AI will attend lectures for you, write your papers, and even log into EdTech platforms like Canvas to take tests and participate in discussions.Educators told me that Einstein is just one of many AI tools that can do homework for students, but should be seen as a warning to schools that are increasingly seen by students as a place to gain a diploma and status as opposed to the value of education itself.
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If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I'd argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”But humans aren’t horses. “This is much bigger than Einstein,” Matthew Kirschenbaum told 404 Media. “Einstein is symptomatic. I doubt we’ll be talking about Einstein, as such, in a year. But it’s symptomatic of what’s about to descend on higher ed and secondary ed as well.”
Kirschenbaum teaches English at the University of Virginia and has written at length about artificial intelligence. He’s also a member of the Modern Language Association (MLA) where he serves as member of its Task Force on AI Research and Teaching. Einstein isn’t the first agentic AI to do the work of a student for them, it’s just one that got attention online recently. Kirschenbaum and his fellow committee members flagged their concerns about these AIs in October, 2025.
“Agentic browsers are becoming widely available to the public. These offer AI ‘agents’ that can navigate [learning management systems] and complete assignments without any student involvement,” the MLA’s statement from October said. “The recent and hasty integration of generative AI features into those systems is already redefining student and instructor relationships, evaluative standards, and instructional outcomes—with no compelling evidence that any of it is for the better.”
The statement called on educators, lawmakers, and learning management system providers like Canvas, too cooperate in order to give academic institutions the abilities to block AI agents like Einstein.
Canvas did not respond to a request for comment.
Einstein is explicit in its pitch: it will log into Canvas (one of the most popular and ubiquitous pieces of education software) and do your classwork for you, just like Kirschenbaum and his fellows warned about last year.
The attractiveness of agentic AIs is a symptom of a decades-long trend in higher education. “Universities…by and large adopted a transactive model of education,” Kirschenbaum said. “Students see their diploma as a credential. They pay tuition and at the end of four years, sometimes five years, they receive the credential and, in theory at least, that is then the springboard to economic stability and prosperity.”
Paliwal seems to agree. He told 404 Media that he attempted to change the university from the inside while working as a TA, but felt stymied by politics. “The only way to force these institutions to evolve is to bring reality to their face. And usually the loudest critics are the ones who can't do their own job well and live in fear of automation,” he said.
For Paliwal, agentic AIs are a method of freeing people from the labor of education. “I think we really need to question what learning even is and whether traditional educational institutions are actually helping or harming us,” he said. “We're seeing a rise in unemployment across degree holders because of AI, and that makes me question whether this is really what humans are born to do. We've been brainwashed as a society into valuing ourselves by the output of our productive work, and I think humanity is a lot more beautiful than that. Is it really education if we're just memorizing things to perform a task well?”
Kirschenbaum said that programs like Einstein are the inevitable conclusion of viewing higher education as a certification and transactive process. “What we’re finding is that if forms of education can be transacted then we’ve just about arrived at the point where autonomous software AI agents are capable of performing the transaction on your behalf,” he said. “And so the whole educational paradigm has come back to essentially bite itself in the ass.”
He said that one solution he’s seen work is to retreat from devices entirely in the classroom. “Colleagues who have done it report that students are almost universally grateful. They understand the reasoning. They understand the logic,” he said. “And they appreciate the opportunity to be freed from the phones and the screens and to focus and engage with other people in a meaningful dialogue.”
But the abandonment of EdTech platforms and screens won’t work for every student. Anna Mills, an English professor at the College of Marin and a colleague of Kirschenbaum’s on the MLA AI task force, compared the fight against agentic AI in education to cybersecurity. “We could decide that bots need to be labeled as bots and that we need to be able to distinguish human activity from AI activity online in some circumstances and that we want to build infrastructure for that,” she said. “That would be an ongoing project, as cybersecurity is.”
Mills is not a luddite. She’s an expert in artificial intelligence systems as well as English, frequently uses Claude, and has been documenting the rise of agentic AIs in EdTech on her YouTube channel for months. She said that using agentic AI like Einstein was cheating, full stop, and academic fraud. “This is in direct violation of these foundational agreements that we make in order to use technology for human communication, human exchange, and human work online,” she said. “And yet that’s not obvious to us. It seems like it’s just another tool, right? But it’s not.”
Mills said she understands Paliwal’s frustrations with education. “But what you need to understand is that online learning spaces are critical for students to access any kind of education,” she said. For her, the proliferation of tools like Einstein do more than help a student bypass the labor of the classroom. They poison the educational well. Online learning has been a boon to many kinds of non-traditional students and that the rise of agentic AI is a threat to that not just because it trivializes traditional forms of education, but because it hurts the credibility of EdTech itself and other online platforms.
The vast majority of college students aren’t attending Ivy League schools, they’re grinding away at night classes in community colleges across the country. Distance and online learning has been an enormous boon for those students. “If there’s no credibility to that, then you’ve just ruined the investment and the learning goals and the access to meaningful learning that that they can then also use for employment of students who are underprivileged, who can’t come to the classroom, who are working full time and raising families and trying to get an education,” Mills said.
Students aren’t horses and there is no greater freedom they can buy themselves by using AI tools to cheat in the classroom. And worse, the more these tools proliferate, the more suspect the entire enterprise becomes. It’s one thing to cheat yourself out of an education, it’s quite another to muddy the waters of EdTech platforms and online learning for everyone else.
AI Is Ushering in a Textpocalypse
Our relationship to writing is about to change forever; it may not end well.Matthew Kirschenbaum (The Atlantic)