Children once learned by taking things apart. Today’s devices do not provide that rewarding activity — and the cognitive consequences may be considerable.

It is difficult to overstate how profoundly humanity has been influenced by the transmission and accumulation of knowledge. But we can begin to appreciate this when we consider cases of individuals attempting to create everyday artifacts “from scratch.” If divisions of cognitive labor are powerful engines of technological growth, what happens to humans when those divisions no longer exist?

This scenario has been repeatedly depicted in novels where a person travels back in time to an earlier era. In Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” for example, a mechanic named Hank, who works in a 19th-century arms factory in Connecticut (Twain’s present day), is transported into the Arthurian era — specifically, 528 AD. He goes on to easily create devices from his era, such as modern guns and bicycles. In the end, Hank’s technological improvements are rejected by the powerful church hierarchy, which sets out to destroy him. Hank escapes by returning to his own era. Likewise, in Leo Frankowski’s “Conrad Stargard” novels, published in the ’80s, a Polish army engineer is transported back to 1231 AD in Poland and soon helps accelerate his country’s technology to safeguard it from a Mongol invasion. He knows from his history studies that the invasion will come in about 10 years. He succeeds and goes on to create a glorious future for Poland.

Inspiring and enjoyable as Twain’s and Frankowski’s tales may be, they both present highly unrealistic visions of what solo experts could actually achieve in earlier eras. Indeed, both authors, intentionally or not, greatly underestimate the challenges their protagonists would face.

If you want a more accurate picture, one might find it in Thomas Thwaites’s 2011 book “The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch.” In it, Thwaites, a British designer, recounts his attempt to build a working toaster from raw materials found in the wild. This is no easy feat. For example, many parts of the toaster are made of metal. To procure those metals, Thwaites returns to the original natural deposits in the Earth’s crust. This initial step alone soon overwhelms him as a solo agent. He must consult with experts who tell him which locations on Earth contain likely metal veins that could be extracted and refined. Without that help, he would have wandered aimlessly through the countryside, sifting through soil and rocks that contained none or only scant traces of the required copper, iron, and nickel.

Thwaites soon “cheats” by consulting with a metallurgy expert. The expert indicates that even if Thwaites goes to the highest-yielding mines in the world, he’d still probably need to sift through a ton of raw materials for each metal to get enough to make the metal parts of a single toaster. Thwaites initially plans to also find the raw materials for the toaster’s plastic parts, but soon learns that producing plastic from raw materials requires complex processing of crude oil, which helps explain why plastics arrived technologically much later than metal artifacts. Undeterred, Thwaites later tries to synthesize plastic as well, albeit unsuccessfully.

Thwaites acts on the expert’s information about good locations for iron ore. He travels north from London to a mine that has yielded high-quality iron for centuries. But here, again, Thwaites must cheat. He cannot extract the necessary rocks from the mine on his own, and he doesn’t even know where to start digging. He commandeers a pickaxe but soon discovers that it is utterly inadequate. He ends up taking another shortcut when a benevolent veteran miner simply gives him 40 kilograms of especially high-yield ore, which Thwaites wheels home in a large suitcase that falls apart en route.

Guided by historical descriptions of early smelting, and after many trial-and-error attempts, Thwaites eventually builds a “furnace” that produces a product resembling usable iron. But the product isn’t of sufficient quality, and Thwaites resorts to a microwave-powered furnace to obtain a usable one. Thus, just to get to the point of having workable iron, Thwaites resorts to many shortcuts, with the help of experts and modern-day devices; yet all these shortcuts are only the first steps in the process of making an operational toaster. The full story is far too long to even summarize, but Thwaites sums it up as follows:

My attempt to make a toaster has shown me just how reliant we all are on everyone else in the world. Though there’s romance in that idea of self-sufficiency and living off the land, there’s also absurdity. There is no turning back the clock to simpler times — not without mass starvation anyway.

Many authors with deep science backgrounds have tried to envision what it would take to rebuild a high-tech society after a disastrous collapse. Here too, the need for groups of specialists embedded in functioning communities is far more intense than is immediately obvious.

Lewis Dartnell, a science writer with a research background in biology, illustrates in his book “The Knowledge” the challenges of rebooting modern technology after a disaster such as an asteroid strike. Even if 1 out of 100 people survived the disaster, after a few generations of trying to live off what was left by those who perished, all technology and supplies at the time of the initial disaster would have deteriorated so badly that the remaining survivors would have to reinvent the technological world from scratch.

Because Dartnell’s analysis envisions communities developing specialists with deep knowledge in specific areas, the challenges posed are fewer than those faced by a single person acting on their own. And because everyone vaguely remembers what once existed and what those things did, they know what goals are plausible. Yet, even with all those advantages over a solo individual, reinventing the modern world is immensely difficult.

Dartnell takes the reader through the details of what it takes to slowly resurrect a modern civilization: He starts with agriculture and the thousands of years it took to artificially select high-yield grain seed. If the international seed banks were not available, people might well starve before they could make enough progress to survive. Even then, the right crop must be chosen for a given location, climate, and season. Appropriate soil is also critical, as are the best ways to prepare, irrigate, and harvest. Just the initial agriculture section of Dartnell’s book quickly reveals how utterly dependent we are on expertise clusters in the present and on the accomplishments of specialists from the past. The convergence of conclusions drawn by authors of disaster recovery scenarios with those drawn by the rapidly growing study of cumulative cultural evolution is striking.

After agriculture, a similar enormity of challenges and interdependencies is revealed in storing and cooking food and making useful clothing. Finding and gathering substances such as lime, various oils, and soap ingredients is not much easier. Learning to use the right kinds of woods and clays also presents huge hurdles to a novice. The hurdles become increasingly high as Dartnell discusses restarting medicine, reliable power systems, transportation, and communication systems.

Even larger challenges must be overcome to reach the present day. One is forced to ask how likely it was that humans ever advanced beyond the simplest hunter-gatherer communities. What if 60,000 years ago the first person to make a hafted axe chose the wrong vine, and the stone broke free, killing the group’s leader? In most alternate futures, we might still be hacking away with one-part stone tools. Humans may have been exceptionally lucky to have stumbled into virtuous feedback loops between devices and communities of experts. Wind things back 100,000 years, add a little randomness, and our future may represent only a tiny fraction of all possible futures in which technology vaulted forward rapidly in Homo sapiens rather than settling into a more common, stable early Stone Age equilibrium.

Converging evidence of human propensities to underestimate the paths and partners involved in creating technological revolutions can be found in how badly we underestimate the time it typically takes from first making a working model of a device to arriving at a version that is practical and affordable for everyday use by all members of a culture.

We may assume the invention of the first light bulb and the first steam engine were quickly translated into widely available forms; however, it usually took years to progress from the initial prototypes to commonplace versions. It took decades for the “invention” of commercially viable color photographs, telegraphs, telephones, AM radios, FM radios, transistors, integrated circuits, CPUs, fiber optic cables, and LCD displays, among thousands of other examples. We grossly underestimate the time required, the number of people involved, and the heavy reliance on historical precedents. By favoring mostly mythologized stories of solitary geniuses single-handedly causing technological and scientific revolutions, we divert our attention from the much more ubiquitous and powerful processes of cumulative cultural evolution.

Since prehistory, widespread and relatively abrupt changes in the nature of the artifacts suggest ensuing changes in thought about those artifacts and about the world more generally. The shift from single-component tools to complex tools, such as the hafted axe, spurred an explosion of other complex tools in a relatively short period, a development that may have been unrelated to any changes in the human brain. As humans live longer and healthier lives, grandparents and even great-grandparents are more involved in preserving and transmitting culture to younger generations. Moreover, the increasing ability to communicate with anyone, anywhere on the planet, facilitates cultural transmission between the most relevant experts and novices worldwide.

Artifacts, including toys, have often been critical repositories of expert knowledge and influenced how we understand the world. The introduction of clocks and other self-contained dynamic devices provided new ways of thinking not just about machines but about the human body as having a mechanical interior, as Descartes famously argued. An oft-overlooked revolution occurred with the sudden rise of interchangeable parts in the 19th century. Interchangeable parts enabled people to think about functions and component interactions in new ways.

The introduction of electronic devices and circuits in the late 1800s and early 1900s was at first relatively easy to understand through metaphors arising from hydraulics and simple push/pull relations. In addition, those early electronic components, such as vacuum tubes, capacitors, and resistors, could be seen, touched, isolated, and removed from a device. This, in turn, allowed tinkering and repair. While early electrical devices may have had a massive influence on how people lived, they may not have had such a dramatic impact on how they thought and how their children learned.

However, with the rise of transistors and, more rapidly, of integrated circuits, this mechanistic transparency vanished. Soon, the number of parts in some transistors reached the millions, then the billions. Not only did this increase overwhelm human reasoning about components and their interactions, but it also led to a transition from thinking about mechanical interactions to focusing on digital operations and functional sequences.

If individuals’ intelligence reflects cultural intelligence passed down through successive generations, today’s children may be at risk. Recent technological changes have occurred so quickly that parents today are often unfamiliar with novel digital devices; they may be ill-equipped to convey the new forms of information needed by the next generation.

This is a particularly important point when it comes to children. Well before they begin schooling, children are driven to look beyond the obvious. They spontaneously explore and uncover hidden parts that provide pleasing insights into the underlying causal machinery governing their visible properties and behavior. This is where some of the most striking development can occur and where guidance by knowledgeable adults may be most powerful.

But today, children are increasingly confined to considering the surfaces of things and their uses or functions. Information that was easily available a few decades ago has largely evaporated, with no other, deeper webs of information becoming available. It would be remarkable if such dramatic changes in children’s exposure to the underlying architectures of devices had no downstream effects on how they think about causal relationships in the world around them. Our job is to understand whether such effects are likely to be negative, positive, or largely inconsequential.

Frank C. Keil is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Cognitive Science at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books, including “Wonder” and “The Disappearance of Insight,” from which this article is adapted.

YouTube currently requires that content creators let viewers know "when they use AI to meaningfully alter or generate photorealistic content."

The policy draws some strange boundaries. It applies to "AI-generated music" (not photorealistic) but not to "riding a unicorn through a fantastical world" (this could be photorealistic, though it is not plausible). YouTube then summarizes the policy in a different way: "Realistic AI content and meaningful changes require disclosure, while non-realistic or minor edits don’t."

But AI uses that require no disclosure can include everything from "idea generation" up through "production assistance, like using generative AI tools to create or improve a video outline, script, thumbnail, title, or infographic." Creators are free to clone their own voices for voiceovers. They can also use "AI-generated or altered animation of a missile in a fully animated video."

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Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve dreamed of constructing a giant labyrinth. I used to draw elaborate mazes1 on napkins during family dinners, dreaming of one day building one big enough to wander in forever. I’ve spend days rabbitholing on the topic of catacombs. But I’m just not a dreamer. I’m a doer.

So here’s how I made my dream - of constructing a giant labyrinth and putting a bunch of people in it - a reality.

For some context, every year my friends and I orchestrate an elaborate, month-long scavenger hunt called Pursuit. “Scavenger hunt” hardly encapsulates it, it’s more like an immersive art, alternate reality game that hypnotizes the good people of San Francisco to devote a month of their lives to following our every command. 1.5% of SF plays it.

Past missions included finding and tuning in to hidden super-local radios, whispering a secret word at a bakery for a fortune cookie with a clue inside, chasing down a car from a livestream, and scaling a hill to scour for letters painted in the distance.

And it’s 100% free to play. Created for the love of the game.

Two years ago, my mission started by decoding a limerick about a Yugoslavian Ex-Marine who did competitive birdwatching, which lead you to bookstores where I planted a book I wrote, Competitive Birdwatching for Yugoslavian Ex-Marines2.

Last year, my mission started by solving a connect-the-dots. You drew between the dots to form a map of San Francisco, with an X-marks the spot.

When you went to that spot, you discovered an art gallery with recreations of famous paintings with our character, Percy, in them.

Then you used the gallery program to decode the artwork.

This year, I wanted to think bigger, bolder. I jokingly suggested a giant labyrinth, drawing on my childhood aspirations, then thought - why would I not achieve my dreams? I believe in myself. I can do anything! Why should I restrain my creative spirit, why should I beat myself to the ground, let self-doubt spit upon me, and so easily give the world exactly what it wants?

Yet even as I mustered the courage to believe in myself, others doubted me.

Even people that I thought were my good friends, like Sam Sliman, betrayed me, expressing doubt that I would be able to construct my labyrinth.

Here’s what Sam would look like as a horse, and here’s what Sam would look like as Mr. Beast3:

Perhaps it’s because I keep winning Sam’s Fake Pitch nights4 so hard that it embarrasses all the other contestants, and he resents this.

All this to say, I wasn’t about to let the haters bring me down.

I spent basically all of the scheduled two months of Pursuit preparation figuring out how exactly to construct my labyrinth. Wood? PVC pipe? And where I could put it - labyrinths are pretty big, you know.

I had to stay within budget, I also couldn’t drill anything into the wall. So I landed on constructing the walls out of photo backdrop frames and a web of paracord strung to command hooks on the walls and wrapped around support columns. The walls had to be lightweight enough to not pull these hooks down, also, the heftier things are, the more expensive they tend to be, so I decided on sheer fabric.

By the fault of my own hubris, this project had gotten very much out of control, and I needed some serious manpower, so I put out a call on substack, instagram, twitter, and my sf schemes chat. And miraculously, people were down to clown.

I spent three days constructing the labyrinth with a gaggle of helpers, on the last day in an act of immense hubris I spent several hours working alone, and aggravated a prior strain, very badly re-injuring my hand.

Anyways.

Here’s the clue that led players to the puzzle location - can you figure out where to go?

Here’s a walkthrough of my labyrinth. Can you solve the puzzle?5

I also constructed a giant paper mache minotaur head, of course.6

In the end, I successfully trapped almost a thousand people in my labyrinth, Sam Sliman formally apologized for doubting me, none of the labyrinth walls came horribly crashing down, labyrinth-construction-volunteers gleefully took turns chasing people around in the minotaur head, and all my wildest dreams came true.

All this to say: the world will try to beat you down. And you can’t just take it. You have to fight back like a rabid dog to get what you deserve.

You will only accomplish as big as you dare to dream. You set your own ceiling of potential. If you aspire to nothing, if you’re not willing to take a leap of faith, and risk failure, then you will only achieve exactly what you aspired to: nothing.

I can already SMELL the comments comparing me to Mr. Beast, and let me just say, since I’m always one step ahead: Mr. Beast would have to pay 899 people 1 million dollars to get trapped inside his labyrinth.7 But me? I can get 899 people to do it for free. And thank me for it.

So, was constructing my labyrinth worth all the time, energy, and injury it took?

Objectively - no, not even close.

But am I so stubborn that, if I had to go back in time, I would choose to do it again and again nonetheless?

Yes, of course.

The moral of the story: NEVER doubt me, because not only will it be really embarrassing for you when I inevitably succeed, making you look like a huge idiot, you will also be banished from ever entering my labyrinth8 and regret it forever.

Also, with just a few dozen people who’re down to clown, anything is possible.

Love,

Danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁)

Editor’s Note:

I couldn’t have accomplished my dreams without the help of ~40 volunteers, mostly strangers summoned from the internet. The number of volunteers was so incredibly heartwarming, especially as someone bad at asking for help. They also brought such great ideas I couldn’t have thought of alone. One guy literally came on crutches with a broken leg, and pulled out every single tool imaginable from his magical van, to aid many snags.

I had no idea how to repay these volunteers, I was just like, “Hey, I owe you big time, you can wear the giant minotaur head and chase people around the labyrinth if you’d like? I don’t know what else to offer you.” But people were just happy to contribute to a scheme :,)

If YOU want to be offered insane sidequests from time to time, follow me on instagram and twitter. And, of course, subscribe :)

In Outer news, my startup Outernet was featured in TechCrunch this week, and reached the top-downloaded chart on the app store for the first time last week :) I’m so excited about getting people to go out and explore!

Also, we hit 10,000 𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁 readers last week :,) love ya guys!

And as always, huge thank you to my paid subscribers for funding the mischief: Adam, Adler, Anne, Bathtime, Christina, Cori, Cristin, Cynthia, Dan, Eli, Emily, Erika, Erikka, Fanclau, Francesca, Gillian, Jade, Jeff, Jen, Jey, Joana, Jon, Judy, Kat, Lucy, Mariarita, Miranda, N.Y., Paige, Patrek, Patrick, Rebecca, Roland, Ryan, Sasha, Siena, Tamsin, Tanairi, Tomer, Wren, and Yush.

Imagine walking into a random classroom. The teacher gives students a task. Read something, try these math problems, answer these questions.

In some classrooms most students get right to work. In others, most don’t. Why?

Motivation is a big topic. I want to write about a framework I have that helps me think about how to motivate students in the classroom, but first I want to clarify what I mean by motivation. I’m talking about the situation above. Do students attempt the task in front of them? Do they put in effort or try to get through an assignment with as little thought as possible? Do students persevere if they don’t know something right away?

Motivation is complicated. There’s no one magic button that motivates students, no single strategy that teachers can always rely on. But that can also be overwhelming: ask teachers for advice about motivation and you’ll get lots of different answers.

The Framework

To me, the fundamental difference between motivation strategies is the time scale. Some motivation strategies are useful in the short term. These are limited: they don’t last very long, so you’ll need to keep finding more motivators, but they can also be helpful tools to build momentum. Medium-term motivators take more time to get going, but can help motivate students over multiple days and weeks with sustained effort. Long-term motivators are the real magic: self-sustaining tools that are slow to build but the most powerful. Every teacher needs multiple motivation strategies, and the best motivation strategies fit together and build on each other.

Short-Term

Short-term motivators include choice, relevance, enjoyment, and extrinsic incentives. These are all useful tools. Giving students choice helps them feel ownership over their learning. Helping students feel like learning is relevant to their lives can cultivate interest in a subject. Most humans like to have fun, and making a lesson enjoyable is better than the opposite. And while extrinsic rewards and consequences aren’t always fun to talk about, they are valuable tools.

The first problem with short-term motivators is that they are short-term. These might work well in motivating students today or tomorrow, but to motivate them next week you’ll probably need to continue designing in opportunities for choice, or relevance, or enjoyment, or extrinsic incentives. Some teachers are really passionate about these! If that’s you, go for it. But one risk is burnout: because these short-term motivators must be renewed day after day, they require continual effort and can feel like an endless treadmill.

The second problem with short-term motivators is that they often involve tradeoffs. If you are giving students choice day after day, how confident are you that those choices involve equal learning? Maybe most of your students like soccer so you use that to make learning relevant, but what about the students who don’t like soccer? If you are prioritizing enjoyment, are you compromising on learning? And extrinsic incentives offer a whole raft of tradeoffs. If you can’t be consistent with a reward or consequence it will quickly lose its power, and over time students may find ways to game the system.

This isn’t to say short-term motivators are useless. But from my perspective, their primary use is in the name: they are short-term tools to “get the ball rolling,” and move towards the medium-term and long-term motivators, or maintain momentum, rather than as the primary reason students are motivated to learn.

Medium-Term

Medium-term motivators include habits, success, and accountability. These honestly sound totally boring. Routines build habits, and a good way to get students engaging with schoolwork is to build habits through everyday consistency. If students feel successful in school they are more likely to engage with learning, and if they feel dumb they are more likely to tune out. A human in the room who communicates to students that their learning matters, and that they will hold students to account if they don’t put effort in, can nudge students in the direction of more effort.

The disadvantage of these strategies is that they don’t work right away, and they also require regular effort. Habits don’t happen overnight. The effects of feeling successful build gradually, especially for students who have often felt unsuccessful in school in the past. Students often resist accountability at first. These also aren’t strategies that a teacher can set and forget: they require constant maintenance. But, when done well, they can be incredibly powerful in helping students feel like their effort matters and that school is a place where it’s worthwhile to work hard.

The other important note about these strategies is that they work best when used consistently from the start of the year. Bad habits are harder to undo than good habits are to build. Once a student feels dumb it’s hard to make them feel smart. A student who feels like they can shirk their work without any adult caring will be even more resistant when the adult starts to hold them accountable. It’s not hopeless in the middle of the year, but it is absolutely a tougher hill to climb.

Long-Term

Long-term motivators include community, identity, and belonging.

If you talk to a veteran teacher, they often talk about these types of long-term motivators. These tools are incredibly powerful, and honestly put all the other motivators to shame.

One thing to note: these motivators can be strengthened or eroded by school culture. In some schools you get a head start: the school already creates common language and systems to support community, identity, and belonging. This is a huge leg up for teachers, especially new teachers. In other schools, it’s every teacher for themselves. It’s still possible to support community, identity, and belonging in schools like those, but it’s much harder. Many veteran teachers have struggled to transition into that second kind of school, finding that the tools that worked for them previously just don’t anymore.1

There’s a classic story in education. Rookie teacher Mr. A is struggling with classroom management and motivation. Students just don’t seem to care in his class. The principal recommends he goes to watch veteran teacher Mr. B, who teaches the same students and gets a lot more effort out of them. Mr. A goes to observe. Students do try a lot harder in Mr. B’s class. But it doesn’t seem like Mr. B is doing anything different at all. The students just sort of listen without any special teacher moves or classroom management on his part. Mr. A feels a bit dejected, like there’s some invisible secret sauce that is being withheld from him, and continues to struggle through the year.

In this story, Mr. B is an expert at building community. That’s great! It’s an incredibly powerful tool for a teacher. But it’s also a tool that is often invisible to others, impossible to imitate, and slow to develop. I’m not an expert at this: I do my best by being a weirdo and coming up with little classroom rituals.

Look, this stuff is worth trying to develop. But I would be really wary about putting all of your eggs in this basket. If the community you’re trying to build doesn’t come together, you can end up in a really tough place without some other motivation strategies to fall back on.

Final Thought

This isn’t an exhaustive collection of motivation strategies. I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff I’m missing. I do think that stepping back to consider whether a motivation strategy is short-term, medium-term, or long-term is a useful exercise. Every teacher needs multiple motivation strategies, and every teacher should understand how those strategies fit together and build on each other.

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The poster depicting famous inventions by Black figures throughout history should show the invention George Crum is widely credited with: the potato chip.

Instead, the picture labeled with Crum’s name shows a firefighter in an ominous gas mask next to a stop light. There are no potato chips to be found.

But there is a typo-ridden description of Crum that reads: “Created the popular crispy snack when a customer is polated thinner fried potatees.”

For $4, teachers can have the privilege of downloading that poster, a slideshow about Black inventors, and a seven-minute video from Teachers Pay Teachers, a marketplace for teachers to find lesson plans, classroom decor, activities, and more. The site, which rebranded as TPT in 2022, is education’s answer to Etsy.

For $1.99, they could also download an alphabet coloring worksheet missing the letter F. And for just $1.50, they could get a poster of U.S. presidents that uses an asteroid hurtling toward anti-slavery demonstrators to illustrate the idea that Martin Van Buren was resilient.

Teachers Pay Teachers is a platform used by 85% of pre-K-12 educators in the U.S., its parent company said in a 2023 press release. It has long been controversial, with some educators and curriculum developers casting doubt on the quality of resources up for sale. But it inspired trust in other teachers due to the premise baked into its name. Now that trust is eroding, and it’s because of something educators have noticed while shopping. Increasingly, some of Teachers Pay Teachers’ resources appear to be AI-generated.

Moreover, some of the AI-generated content that hasn’t been vetted very well includes obvious errors, slipshod graphics, and questionable information, according to a Chalkbeat review of material on Teachers Pay Teachers.

It’s the type of low-quality content commonly known as “AI slop.” And teachers say it’s turning up on TPT, which means some of it could end up in the classroom.

In an emailed statement, Paul Mishkin, CEO of IXL Learning, TPT’s parent company, wrote that the company uses “algorithmic tools to identify and demote stores associated with low-quality, AI-generated content.”

“These measures are already highly effective, such that AI-generated products account for a minuscule fraction of a percent of TPT’s sales,” Mishkin wrote.

TPT’s two decades in existence, some argue, is a sign that many school districts still aren’t arming educators with high-quality instructional material. The flood of what appears to be low-quality AI content may just further poison the well.

Teachers are expected to create a lot of material, sometimes on a time crunch or during the summer when they’re not paid, said Jeff Carpenter, an education professor at Elon University. That pressure to create instructional material leads them to turn to Teachers Pay Teachers or similar sites.

“They don’t have the time and energy to assess the quality,” Carpenter said. “They’re sort of drowning under the load of expectations on them, and so they think, ‘Well, this is a highly rated resource, and so I’m going to print it off and give it to my students without really looking at it.’”

AI fuels cottage industry of curriculum creators

Some of the tells of AI-generated content are relatively subtle.

When Elisa Greb, an eighth grade English teacher outside of Pittsburgh, is on the lookout for material made by AI, she watches for bulleted lists with bolded headings, for example.

Greb said she started noticing the proliferation of AI content about a year ago. Greb rarely turns to TPT for class content, but occasionally turns to it for grammar content, which can be one of the hardest topics to hook students’ interest.

“One of the greatest joys for me as a teacher is the creativity,” she said. “What really bothers me on something like TPT, where people are monetizing, is that they’re asking for your money for something that they didn’t actually create.”

Chalkbeat also spotted what look to be AI suggestions for titles that might help the resource appear prominently in search results, price suggestions, and even disclosures that content had been generated by AI.

But if AI-generated content on TPT sets off algorithmic red flags, it seems no one has told the cottage industry of content creators who advertise themselves as coaches for folks wanting to start a TPT shop.

In one YouTube video, a creator said that leveraging AI isn’t about replacing creativity, but “multiplying our efforts” to supply teacher resources online. Many of the coaches encouraging AI use also caution TPT creators to edit and watch for quality issues in AI-generated content.

Catharyn Shelton, a professor with Northern Arizona University, said teachers sharing content with other teachers is in principle a good idea — when the content is of good quality. But scaling up the model into a marketplace is often where the problems come in, incentivizing creators to build shops with thousands of pages of material and sacrifice quality in the process.

It’s easy to turn “to slop because AI is so good at making things sound really good,” she said. “Even if the actual content or ideas aren’t really there.”

‘I do use AI-assisted tools’

Chalkbeat reached out to a few TPT vendors selling what appeared to be AI-generated materials.

Jade Désautels, the creator behind The Garden of Art, the store that sold the Black inventors posters featuring George Crum, wrote that she became an educational resource creator after 15 years as a full-time teacher.

She declined an interview and did not directly acknowledge using AI, but wrote that she uses a “variety of digital tools as part of my creative process.” Désautels also wrote she reviews resources before publishing them.

In another instance, a set of posters about musical instruments in Black history included an image of a traditional African drum and the words “add a performer playing it in a lively village setting.” There is no performer or village in the image.

A user wrote in a review that the $4.28 posters were “poorly made” and “it was very obvious that AI was used.”

The creator of that resource, Achraf Zenmrouni, said over email that they had adjusted and improved the graphics after Chalkbeat inquired about the work. Zenmrouni wrote that “I use AI-assisted tools as part of my design and creative process,” but added they personally reviewed the material before it goes live.

A Chalkbeat reporter asked ChatGPT to respond to inquiries about supposed low-quality, AI-generated teacher resources as if it were a creator of those resources. In part, the AI wrote, “I do use AI-assisted tools as one part of my creative process.”

ChatGPT then added: It reviews the content before it’s published.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org. Lily is on Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook.