Skilled trades are typically seen as professions that won’t be permeated by AI. But that’s starting to change. Jeff visited auto tech classes at Dakota County Technical College in Rosemount, Minn., where the instructors built an AI mentor tool to help students troubleshoot car repairs. But the biggest win for AI for budding mechanics turns out to involve not fixing cars, but helping explain their repairs to customers.

More than 40 percent of high school students have AI friends or know someone who does, according to a recent survey. What does this phenomenon mean for how students and teachers view the AI tools used in education. What are the risks and potential benefits of turning to a bot for companionship? Hear from a researcher who has studied AI friends, and from a college dean who developed an unexpected relationship with a bot.

Students at the University of Notre Dame are calling for professors to redesign all the classes in the core curriculum so that AI can’t be used for assignments. It’s a matter of fairness, and a call to make sure every student is actually doing the hard work of reading complex texts and expressing their own ideas in writing so they learn the basic skills they’ve come to campus for. The argument, made by editors of the student newspaper, has sparked a discussion about if that should be done — and if so, how?

AI is not the only disruptive force facing colleges these days. In fact, we may have already passed the peak of higher education’s size and role in American society. That’s the argument by futurist Bryan Alexander in his new book “Peak Higher Education,” which notes that AI is a huge part of what might be a sector at a crossroads. But he is looking for ways to harness AI to improve and rebuild colleges.

We set up a table at the University of Minnesota and asked students to share how they use AI in their studies — and how they feel about the technology. Fear was the common thread — Fear of being caught, fear of not learning, and fear of AI taking away jobs or making their degrees less valuable. And in some cases the students shied away from trying AI tools even in productive ways, for fear of being accused of academic misconduct. This special episode of Learning Curve was co-produced with Ceci Heinen, podcast producer of the university’s student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily.

Colleges are experimenting with making online teaching videos featuring AI avatar versions of professors. Some students find the simulated likenesses of their instructors a bit creepy, but proponents say the technology could be key to making college courses more active and human. The idea is that AI will make it easy to make personalized teaching videos so that more teachers can adopt a “flipped classroom” approach — where students watch video lecturers as homework so class time is spent on discussion or projects.

Ella Stapleton noticed something unusual in lecture notes her professor handed out to students. Coverage of what happened next sparked discussion about misuse of AI in education – not by students trying to cheat, but by professors using AI to outsource parts of their jobs.

A growing number of colleges are giving their students and professors free access to pro versions of AI tools, even as some professors and students worry about potential negative consequences of the technology. Jeff traveled to Duke University to talk to Evan Levine, senior director of IT services and support, and Michael Faber, assistant director of the Innovation Co-Lab to hear their philosophy behind their DukeGPT initiative. And he chats with a student as well, Muke Akume.

If students are already prone to check out in school, it really doesn’t help to look over and see students secretly having ChatGPT do their work for them. The co-author of the new book on student disengagement in school, Rebecca Winthrop, is encouraging debate on how to adopt AI in a way that turns more kids into “explorers” rather than “passengers” in their learning.

A former university president is trying to reimagine college teaching with AI in mind, and this year he released an unusual video that provides a kind of artist’s sketch of what that could look like. For this episode, I talk through the video with that leader, Paul LeBlanc, and get some reaction to the model from longtime teaching expert Maha Bali, a professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo.

To suss out the best way to use AI in education, it’s important to figure out what makes ChatGPT and other new AI tools tick. After all, the ‘thinking’ that generative AI does is different than human thinking. That’s the argument of Mutlu Cukurova, who wrote a paper calling for building ‘hybrid intelligences’ that blends the strengths of humans and AI, rather than quickly replacing tasks that teachers and tutors do with AI models.

Teachers and students can't help wondering ... what are we doing here? What's the role of education when AI seems able to do tasks that once seemed uniquely human. The goal of Learning Curve is to inform a conversation about what it means to learn, whether AI could improve education, and which learning needs protecting amid the AI gold rush. Look for the first episode August 20.