On what people get wrong when they say “AI did it,” and what my students and my mentors taught me instead.
People often look at the work and say, “AI did that.”
I always answer yes. AI co-creates with me. But then I ask them to read the letters again, because there is a “+” hiding in plain sight, and the “+” is everything.
Read it as A+I.
The A is the tool. The I is me. But the I was never only me. My students taught me what they need, in classroom after classroom, year after year. They are the ones who showed me where the teaching was failing and where it had to bend. And before there were ever students in front of me, there were mentors behind me. I learned from them. They shaped how I see, how I teach, what I refuse to compromise on. To let them disappear into a two-letter acronym would be its own kind of erasure, and I will not do it.
So the I in A+I is plural in both directions: it is my mentors who taught me, me in the middle, and my students who keep teaching me still. The tool comes after all of them, in service to what they gave me. That ordering is the whole argument. In the “AI did it” story, the tool leads and the people disappear.
In my story, the people lead, the lineage holds, and the tool helps me meet what they taught me to meet.
+
There is a second thing the letters carry, and anyone who knows my work will catch it. A+ is my framework. The dignity dimensions I use to ask whether a social service, or a course, or a classroom, actually serves the people it claims to serve. So A+I is not only a clever reading. It is a test. The technology is worth something only if it makes the work:
Available to the student learning under an air-raid siren.
Accessible to the student who cannot attend in person.
Adequate to the need that a real person brought into a real room.
The letters are a standard the tool has to meet. They are not a credit it gets to claim.
+
And here is the part I will not let go of. When someone says “AI did it,” they erase everyone in one breath. They erase the human who carried the work. They erase the mentors who taught that human how. And they erase the students whose needs shaped every part of it.
A+I puts them all back in the frame. It makes the labour visible, it makes the lineage visible, and it makes the students visible. That last word matters most to me. My whole career has been about accessibility, about who gets to be seen and served and counted. I am not about to use a tool in a way that makes the very people I learned from, and the very students I teach, disappear.
A+I makes them visible.
So the next time you hear it, you can hear it my way:
Yes, AI co-creates with me. But read the “+”.
A is the tool. I is me, my mentors who taught me, and my students who taught me what they need. And together we make the work A+: available, accessible, adequate.
AI does not make people invisible. A+I makes them visible.
That is the difference between a tool that replaces people and a tool that helps a teacher keep a promise made across a whole lineage of teachers. I know which one I am building. My mentors taught me how. My students know it too.
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