When generalized artificial intelligence was introduced to the public in the form of ChatGPT, educators worried about cheating. And for good reason, as many students have admitted to secretly using it for assignments. But the educational applications of AI platforms extend well beyond cheating, and good teachers recognized this pretty quickly. However, given the stigma assigned to student use of AI, some have started to label teacher use as hypocrisy. They’re wrong. These two things are not the same.

Teachers and students are not the same. Students are there to learn; teachers are there to teach. Here’s what that means in real terms: A student has to prove they have mastery over content without the help of reference material. So, when a student uses ChatGPT to complete an assignment, it undermines both the learning process and the student-teacher relationship. On the other hand, teachers have no obligation to abstain from using reference materials or training aids and they pretty much always have. You wouldn’t accuse your math teacher of wrongdoing for using a curriculum guide to create a homework assignment. You wouldn’t blame your social studies teacher for copying readings and notes from a textbook either. ChatGPT allows teachers to quickly pull up custom reference material on demand, but it isn’t fundamentally different from what they’ve always done… it’s just more convenient.

As a teacher, I often use ChatGPT to create random practice assignments like readings or math worksheets. These are things I could find elsewhere if I looked harder, but what would be the point of that? Teachers evolve with the world. Just as teachers learned to use the internet in the late ’90s, I’ve learned to use AI in the 2020s.

There are some ethical concerns in certain cases. If you’re a college professor being paid for very specific expertise where you’re perceived as the foremost authority then there’s a real argument for minimizing AI usage, particularly in emerging fields. But a teacher of general, well-established subjects doesn’t fall into that category.

I get the urge to allege hypocrisy. It seems counterintuitive for educators to bemoan the collapse of academic integrity due to AI and then use AI themselves. But it’s not the same, and we don’t have to pretend it is.