(OSV News) – It autocorrects your e-mails. It enables Siri and Alexa to respond to your questions or commands. It recommends what to watch next on your streaming service. It helps you find your way with navigation apps. It can generate images, videos, term papers and even novels.
It's AI – artificial intelligence – and its rapid ascent as part of everyday life also includes the sphere of Catholic education.
So as the new school year begins, OSV News spoke with educators and thought leaders wrestling with the question of just how AI works – or doesn't work– in the Catholic classroom.
"A few years ago, most conversations were about cheating, policies and whether students should be allowed to use AI tools," Meaghan Crowley-Sullivan told OSV News. She's a developer of curriculum and professional learning at Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles' Innovation in Digital Education & Leadership Institute, known as iDEAL.
"Those questions haven't disappeared; they've matured," she explained. "We're seeing more schools asking, what does good teaching look like in this new digital age? What do students need to learn? What should we be protecting – not only in our instruction, but also in the way we're approaching instruction? And ultimately, what does human formation look like in an AI-shape world?"
Crowley-Sullivan said an emphasis on inclusion has also emerged, while it's simultaneously become obvious parents could use some help from schools.
"They're helping parents understand what these technologies are, and what their children are encountering," Crowley-Sullivan noted. "And how they can establish healthy norms and have more meaningful conversations around AI at home."
Nor is it just students and parents who need guidance.
"When we're teaching teachers how to use this and think about how to incorporate it into their classroom, we lean heavily into that 'human in the loop' conversation," said Shannon Tabaldo, director of iDEAL.
"Human-centered AI is just a tool – it's there to give you additional resources and capacity you've never had before," she continued. "But you're still the expert. We always center on the human with Catholic schools – we always go back to, what are we really trying to do with this tool?"
Crowley-Sullivan and Tabaldo – both parents themselves – have increasingly seen AI used for personalized learning.
Students can critique an AI-generated paper or image, or ask it to turn their poetry attempts into perfect iambic pentameter; AI can easily generate grade- and reading level-specific materials or simulate a "conversation" with an historic figure; teachers can use it to assess student learning patterns, and personalize small group and other instruction.
"The Catholic approach isn't about being afraid of technology or refusing to innovate," emphasized Crowley-Sullivan. "It's very much about discernment, recognizing the possibilities, and asking whether we can use this in ways that promote our values."
Crowley-Sullivan ably echoes Pope Leo XIV's opinion of AI's role in education, recently expressed in his landmark encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence."
"Rapid technological transformations reveal just how unprepared we are on the educational level. Educating people about the use of AI, then, involves teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used," the pontiff wrote. "The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions."
"Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world," the pope advised, "but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships."
In response to such concerns, Crowley-Sullivan developed the "Catholic Companion Framework for Technology and Innovation," to help educators, leaders and families navigate emerging technologies. In use by dioceses across the country and downloaded globally, she will soon present it in the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia – just outside Washington – to assist AI integration in its 51 schools, for almost 13,000 students.
Leslie Lipovski – assistant superintendent for student learning and teaching excellence in the diocese – told OSV News the diocese formed a working group to help shape AI policy.
"In kindergarten through eighth grade, we're talking about AI literacy only – students are not logging into ChatGPT and using it," said Lipovski. "But even kindergartners know about AI. So we're asking, what is AI? How can it be used – for good or bad?"
In high school, Lipovski said, teachers are "very careful about how they use it. I've got some teachers who say, 'We're going to go back to paper and pencil – that's how we're writing essays right now.' But we also have teachers who are embracing it, and showing the kids how to use it responsibly."
The Diocese of Arlington employs PowerSchool – a cloud-based student information system that manages data, grades, attendance, and communication between educators, students and families – as well as LUMA, an intelligent classroom assistant developed by cyber-educator Michael Hargadon that supports both teachers and students.
AI awareness has been evolving, according to Lily Abadal, a partner at Catholic school consultants Partners in Mission, a professor at the University of South Florida and faculty fellow with a project at the University of Notre Dame called DELTA – Human Formation in the Age of AI.
"For the first couple of years after ChatGPT was released, it seemed to a lot of people that it might just be a trend," Abadal said. "They also were not necessarily aware of how it actually worked, and the extent to which students had both access to it, and the kind of things they were capable of producing with it."
"It's obviously something that can make things go faster and easier," she continued. "But there are places in which faster and easier is not good, and not formative in terms of how it shapes students. We learn things are oftentimes not easy – and we have to be able to sit with the hard, in order to learn the Catholic virtues we want students to be formed in throughout their time in Catholic education."
"One of the best gifts we can give students in terms of how to interact with AI," Abadal concluded, "is to show them where technology belongs in their life, and where it does not."
Stephen Eschenfelder – director of campus ministry at Bishop McLaughlin Catholic High School in Spring Hill, Florida, in the Diocese of St. Petersburg – plans to invite Abadal to speak at a future AI conference.
And as a former seminarian with a degree in moral philosophy, who teaches leadership and sacraments classes, he has some very specific ideas about the use of AI in education.
"There has to be a boundary with AI – and I think that turning to God in prayer has to be the boundary," he emphasized. "I cannot use this thing as a medium to have a prayer life, and to have a connection with God. In our theology classes, when we have reflections, a lot of students are using AI. So we have to switch things up, and how we give assignments – because it's reflective material. Some of it is gathering data – but a lot of it is, what do you think about this? How do you feel about this?"
"Students are not in touch with their emotions," Eschenfelder suggested, "because they're relying on artificial intelligence and social media to give them their emotions."
Eschenfelder also finds himself concerned by the potentially "massive iceberg of change" on his students' professional horizon, noting "their jobs could be very much changed by artificial intelligence in a few years."
A student once sheepishly revealed to Eschenfelder that his slide show presentation was AI-generated.
"They robbed themselves of the ability to learn something," said Eschenfelder, who also found students expressing amazement that he would pen a novel on his own rather than just ask AI to write it. "They couldn't understand that," he said, with a hint of exasperation.
Nonetheless, all agreed AI is here to stay.
"We are going to have to adapt schools and teaching, and learning. It's going to look completely different," suggested Lipovski. "Our goal as Catholic schools is to hang on to that humanity – because the teacher is the most important part; the teacher is necessary to guide the students when it is appropriate to use AI, and when it is not appropriate."
"They need that humanity," she concluded. "We can't just turn this over to machines."
