Navigating AI Aversion vs Dependency

I've been teaching at this private school for a little bit over 4 months. In that time, I've had a lot of interesting takeaways that I thought to share, and I hope that if you're working with anyone born after 2000, you'll walk away with at least one new perspective.

1) 80% of classrooms are GPT-dependent and hate it.

I've heard this to be true about public schools too, but with private schools where kids are believed to have an extra "edge", they're just prompting their way through oblivion and hating it. They know it's not their own thoughts. Management frowns upon any AI use, teachers are scared of inaccuracy, and students lean into it to offload the difficulty of thinking through problems.

I posted about this revelation on Reddit, expressing that I was hoping to offer some middle-ground solution. The aversion and pitchforks were palpable, I had DMs, comments, all walks of teachers saying that I embody "the problem" with "tech bros coming into a space they know nothing about and trying to make a sale"

I painted the post with "free" but I guess it still smelled like sales. I felt odd, rejected, I wondered if this was just a Reddit echo chamber. Went to a bunch of private teaching forums, attempted to walk down the same path of bridging free AI tools to help teachers and students navigate better. Felt incredibly uphill, I realized any mission in this direction of AI education would have to be tackled from the ground-up.

I fundamentally believe, purely due to systemic bias, that we are under-equipping future generations and numbing them with media machines. Edu-informational content is meant to serve this gap, take the ones that are motivated and give them a path to trailblaze.

Waiting for curriculum approval or middle management to greenlight doesn't make sense to me. I started building with this group in mind, the next generation of AI specialists. I've also found that this generation motivates and inspires a lot of the open source efforts, and if you have them on your team, you have a novel perspective on architecture, capability, and possibility. Regardless of age, people want to help people.

2) AI aversion will systematically pigeon-hold people, and they will paint AI as the enemy

I (existentially) contemplate the work I do, and who I'm actually serving. Thankfully, starting a new job Monday, I'm out of this environment that demonizes AI, and onto one that rewards innovation. While I do feel that making a corporation more money is great from a career standpoint, I'm setting my seeds for a run in enterprise sales, I worry that in 20-30 years, I would've underserved to the maximum that I could have with what I know.

I find that in my own family, my girlfriend's family, my close friends and their circles, there's a real 60-70% bias towards anti-AI sentiment. Algorithm's off TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, all push this story that AI is inherently the worst thing to ever exist. In the last year, most movies I've seen, AI is somehow part of the enemy's team. It's a real subconscious movement, and it feels wrong to not point that out.

The new role will also give me a lot more time to produce content around this perspective, and I'm hoping to do so in a compelling way (beyond these walls of texts).

Other than money or time, feel free to share how the novelty of AI has inspired you towards a more hopeful future. Coming from a place where I was laid off 4 times and broke a leg in 2024, to now being a solo founder with MRR in 2025, I'm more than grateful for the choices and perspective it's given me in a world that's continually rejecting it.

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