In a message that underscores the growing divide between those embracing artificial intelligence and those resisting it, OpenAI’s Vice President of Education, Leah Belsky, has said workers who fail to learn how to use AI will soon find themselves obsolete.
“Luddites have no place in an AI-powered world,” she said during an episode of OpenAI’s official podcast on Friday.
Belsky, who joined OpenAI in 2024 to lead its education strategy, made the case for early and structured exposure to AI in schools, warning that failure to do so could leave an entire generation unprepared for the future of work.
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“Any graduate who leaves institution today needs to know how to use AI in their daily life,” she said. “And that will come in both where they’re applying for jobs as well as when they start their new job.”
Her comments follow widespread debates within academia, where the use of AI tools like ChatGPT has often been labelled as cheating. But Belsky said such framing misses the point. Rather than banning AI, she argued, educational institutions should teach students how to use it responsibly — not as an “answer machine,” but as a catalyst for deeper learning.
“AI is ultimately a tool,” Belsky said, likening it to calculators once feared by math teachers. “What matters most in an education space is how that tool is used. If students use AI as an answer machine, they are not going to learn. And so part of our journey here is to help students and educators use AI in ways that will expand critical thinking and expand creativity.”
To encourage that kind of learning, OpenAI recently introduced a new feature called Study Mode in ChatGPT. The feature provides students with “guiding questions that calibrate responses to their objective and skill level,” aiming to help them build deeper understanding, rather than regurgitate AI-generated answers. It’s part of the company’s broader push to incorporate structured learning support directly into AI interfaces.
A central skill Belsky believes every student must acquire is coding, even if only at a basic level. She emphasized “vibe coding,” a popular method where people use natural language to prompt AI into writing code. While useful, it’s not foolproof; since AI-generated code can be riddled with errors, users still need some technical knowledge or access to someone who can verify its correctness. Nevertheless, Belsky said such tools will eventually make it easier for every student to not just use AI, but to build with it.
“Now, with vibe coding and now that there are all sorts of tools that make coding easier,” she said, “I think we’re going to get to a place where every student should not only learn how to use AI generally, but they should learn to use AI to create images, to create applications, to write code.”
But some educators remain wary — not of cheating, but of what they call the erosion of “productive struggle.” This idea refers to the challenge learners face in trying to understand new material, an experience many consider crucial to developing real competence. The concern is that AI, by offering instant answers, might rob students of the hard but rewarding process of learning through effort.
OpenAI and others are responding to that criticism. Study Mode and other emerging tools aim to reintroduce intellectual “friction” at strategic points during a student’s interaction with AI. Belsky said this approach could preserve the cognitive work essential to long-term learning.
Tech firms beyond OpenAI are also trying to rethink how students engage with AI. Kira Learning — a startup chaired by Google Brain founder Andrew Ng — has been developing AI tools for the classroom since 2021. This year, it launched a range of agents to help non-expert teachers bring computer science into their lessons. Kira’s CEO, Andre Pasinetti, told Business Insider that the goal is to design AI systems that prompt students to reflect, iterate, and learn from mistakes, rather than merely copy answers.
Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, said universities need to reevaluate their entire approach to teaching.
“There’s a lot of hand-wringing about ‘How do we stop people from cheating’ and not looking at ‘What should we be teaching and testing?’” he said in a recent podcast interview with Azeem Azhar. “The whole system is set up to incentivize getting good grades. And that’s exactly the skill that will be obsolete.”
The consensus among technology leaders, as the use of AI grows in classrooms and boardrooms, appears to be that the divide is no longer between users and non-users, but between those who use AI well and those who don’t.