What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?

Author: Matthew Gault (404 Media) · Published: February 25, 2026 · URL: https://www.404media.co/whats-the-point-of-school-when-ai-can-do-your-homework/

One-line: An agentic AI called Einstein will attend your lectures, write your papers and log into Canvas to take your tests — and the educators Gault interviewed argue it is the logical endpoint of a university system that sold a credential rather than an education.

Summary

Einstein is an agentic AI whose developers claim it will “live the life” of a student: attend lectures, write papers, and log into EdTech platforms like Canvas to sit tests and post in discussions. Gault’s framing is that Einstein is a symptom, not the story.

The builder’s case. Advait Paliwal, a Brown dropout and Einstein’s co-creator, sees no point in going to school if an AI can go for you. His analogy: “I think about horses. They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I’d argue horses became a lot more free… It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’” He says he tried to change the university from inside as a TA and was stymied by politics, that “the only way to force these institutions to evolve is to bring reality to their face,” and that “we’ve been brainwashed as a society into valuing ourselves by the output of our productive work.”

The scholar’s case. Matthew Kirschenbaum teaches English at the University of Virginia and sits on the Modern Language Association’s Task Force on AI Research and Teaching. “Einstein is symptomatic. I doubt we’ll be talking about Einstein, as such, in a year. But it’s symptomatic of what’s about to descend on higher ed and secondary ed as well.” The MLA had already flagged this in October 2025, warning that agentic browsers “can navigate [learning management systems] and complete assignments without any student involvement,” and that the hasty integration of generative AI into those systems is redefining student-instructor relationships and evaluative standards “with no compelling evidence that any of it is for the better.” The task force called on educators, lawmakers and LMS providers to cooperate on the ability to block agents like Einstein. (Canvas did not respond to 404 Media.)

Kirschenbaum’s diagnosis is the piece’s centre of gravity. Universities “by and large adopted a transactive model of education” in which students see the diploma as a credential — pay tuition, receive the credential, treat it as a springboard. And so: “if forms of education can be transacted then we’ve just about arrived at the point where autonomous software AI agents are capable of performing the transaction on your behalf… the whole educational paradigm has come back to essentially bite itself in the ass.” One thing he’s seen work is retreating from devices in the classroom entirely; colleagues report students are “almost universally grateful” and appreciate being freed from phones and screens.

The access objection. Anna Mills, an English professor at the College of Marin and Kirschenbaum’s MLA colleague, is not a Luddite — she uses Claude and has been documenting agentic AI in EdTech on YouTube for months. She calls using Einstein cheating “full stop, and academic fraud,” in “direct violation of these foundational agreements that we make in order to use technology for human communication.” Her proposed direction is infrastructural rather than moral: “We could decide that bots need to be labeled as bots and that we need to be able to distinguish human activity from AI activity online,” an ongoing project the way cybersecurity is.

Her strongest argument is about who actually gets hurt. The majority of college students are not at Ivy League schools; they are in night classes at community colleges, and distance learning has been an enormous boon to them. If agentic cheating destroys the credibility of online learning, “then you’ve just ruined the investment and the learning goals and the access to meaningful learning… of students who are underprivileged, who can’t come to the classroom, who are working full time and raising families.”

Gault’s close answers Paliwal directly: “Students aren’t horses and there is no greater freedom they can buy themselves by using AI tools to cheat in the classroom… It’s one thing to cheat yourself out of an education, it’s quite another to muddy the waters of EdTech platforms and online learning for everyone else.”

Full text

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Connections

• AI Cheating in Education — the agentic step change: not a student using a model to write an essay, but software logging into Canvas and being the student.
• Credentialism — Kirschenbaum’s “transactive model” argument is the sharpest version of this on record: once education is a transaction, it can be delegated, and the credential eats itself.
• AI Education — the institutional response, including the MLA task force’s call for blocking infrastructure.
• Learning — the question underneath, which both sides of the piece actually agree is the real one and answer opposite ways.
• Artificial Intelligence — agentic browsers as the capability that moved this from a discipline problem to an infrastructure problem.