When I first tried ChatGPT, the almost magically sophisticated artificial intelligence tool made by OpenAI, my initial reaction was to marvel at its crisp answers and conversational lucidity. My second thought, as the father of high-school kids, was to say a small prayer for the teachers of the world.

Because ChatGPT knows things. It knows the metaphorical significance of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mocking Bird. It can opine with relative clarity on the merits of autobiography as a literary form in relation to Richard Wright’s Black Boy. It can wax on about morality in Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest.

It can’t yet spin perfect answers right away. But that’s the charm of this remarkable AI chatbot; it riffs off user questions and then hones its answers, based on a large corpus of internet content that OpenAI’s language processing model has ingested over the past few years.