As generative AI drafts essays, solves equations and summarizes novels in seconds, a growing number of teachers say the technology has removed the last excuse schools had for ignoring chronically low student motivation. AI did not create the problem, they argue. It simply exposed it.
Alex Campbell, a sociology teacher at Elizabethton High School in Tennessee, offers one model of a response. In 2017 he challenged students to work on the Redhead Murders, a series of unsolved killings of at least six young women whose bodies were dumped along roadsides across the South from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. He warned them it would be the hardest class they had ever taken. They dove in anyway, tracking down an FBI profiler, interviewing a victim's brother, building timelines from decades-old files and identifying several new victims. They arrived at a theory that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation eventually supported.
Their work became a 2024 true-crime podcast called "Murder 101," and a later group of Campbell's students helped inspire an Amazon Prime series of the same name that reached the streaming service's top three series rankings in July. Campbell said the project worked because students were invested, not because it was easy. "If you ask people about the most meaningful experiences of their life, they're almost always hard," he said.
Chris Hulleman, a University of Virginia researcher who founded the university's Motivate Lab, has studied student motivation for more than 20 years. He said education has not done a good job of making school interesting and relevant, in part because the system prioritizes efficiency, usually measured through standardized test scores. AI, he said, adds its own kind of efficiency by removing steps that once forced students to at least go through the motions. Students now question the "why" of an assignment, and if it seems boring, they ask why they should not use a free tool.
Data suggest many are doing so. The College Board found that the share of high school students using AI for schoolwork rose from 79% to 84% between January and May 2025. A University of Southern California report found most college students default to "executive help," a fast answer with minimal effort, rather than "instrumental help" that builds understanding, unless a professor steers them otherwise. Darren Lam, 18, a recent graduate of Staten Island Technical High School in New York, said some classmates use AI to automate school so thoroughly that "basically the AI is the student."
Colorado math teacher Dylan Kane compared AI to indoor plumbing, which spared people from hauling water but also removed a daily form of exercise. He suggested schools should offer "cognitive exercise" built on what Seymour Papert, the MIT Media Lab co-founder, called "hard fun." That could mean academic subjects for some students and chess, robotics, woodworking, debate or drama for others.
Rebecca Winthrop, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, said AI landed on what had become a "very transactional educational process." A 2024 Gallup survey found that only 17% of middle and high school students strongly agreed that they had learned something interesting at school in the previous seven days. Winthrop added that the bar for being well educated has risen, with higher-order thinking skills now essential. Ben Riley of Deans for Impact said students "don't want to be suckers," so few want to fall behind by doing the work the hard way when peers use AI. Eric Anderman, an Ohio State University educational psychologist, said cheating rises when teachers stress tests and grades over mastery and falls when the message shifts to learning.
Campbell said he builds a ladder for students, starting with a meeting with a victim's brother, then moving on to police and case files. He said authenticity matters most. "Kids can spot a fake in about two seconds," he said. Education researcher Ulcca Joshi Hansen pointed to project-based schools such as Iowa BIG, One Stone in Idaho, Rock Tree Sky in California and the Big Picture Learning network as examples of education built on intrinsic motivation rather than grades, and said youth programs such as Boys and Girls Clubs also offer real-world challenges schools can learn from.
