Commenting on the use of chatbots by students

I joined Pascale Bouchard, host of Tout Compris on Radio-Canada’s Première Chaîne (Manitoba), to discuss the growing presence of AI chatbots in primary and secondary classrooms. This conversation followed survey reports published by The Hub and proposals in Manitoba to ban conversational AI in schools.

Rather than reaching for outright bans, I argued that prohibition risks driving AI usage underground—creating guilt and secrecy while blinding educators to how students actually interact with these tools. Key themes from the discussion included:

• The Dual Nature of Flexible Tools: A chatbot can serve as an infinite resource to feed an obsession with science or history, just as easily as it can be used to generate a turnkey essay to bypass an assignment. The challenge lies in distinguishing genuine inquiry from the impulse to offload effort.
• Cultivating Critical Thinking over Compliance: Because teachers themselves are still navigating these tools, the focus must shift toward helping students recognize why certain cognitive tasks matter, rather than simply policing outputs.
• Rekindling the Spark: When education is reduced to a transactional pipeline for degrees and employment, students naturally optimize for efficiency and shortcut the work. However, when school succeeds in sparking intrinsic curiosity, AI transforms from an evasion mechanism into a powerful catalyst for deeper learning.

Links

• Tout Compris
• Clip
• The Hub article
• Radio-Canada Article