AI Should Extend Teaching, Not Conceal Its Absence

A learner opens an online course and finds a responsive artificial-intelligence tutor. It explains concepts at any hour, asks questions, generates practice cases and never appears impatient. The experience may be genuinely useful. Yet usefulness does not settle the institutional question: what human teaching remains, who knows this learner, who is professionally responsible for the curriculum, and who can intervene when the system or the learner needs more than an answer?

Education has long used books, recordings, learning platforms and automated practice to extend the reach of teachers. Generative AI adds conversational flexibility and scale. The ethical line is crossed when an institution describes AI as augmentation while simultaneously removing structured human contact, increasing class size, reducing academic labour or leaving staff to absorb the exceptions and harms the system cannot resolve.

The issue is not whether a chatbot can teach anything. Evidence already indicates that well-designed digital tutors can support particular learning tasks. The harder question is whether institutions are using that capacity to deepen education or to conceal the absence of the relationships, judgement and responsibility for which learners still depend upon them.

On 2 September, the Guardian reported that about 2,000 members of the National Tertiary Education Union took part in a twenty-four-hour strike at the University of Sydney. Artificial-intelligence protections, workloads, job security and institutional trust were among the disputed issues.…