AI erodes trust between students and teachers. That’s no small concern.

It was my fourth year teaching, and I had just completed a unit on descriptive writing with my ninth graders. I sat down to read their final pieces, both curious and terrified to see what they had come up with. The first few were solid, if unremarkable, but then I picked up a piece that opened with a line that remains crystal clear in my mind 25 years later.

The trees were sprayed with the scent of wonderful.

Once I finished reading, I couldn’t wait to get to school the next day to talk to the author about her work, a delightful evocation of a place in South Carolina where she had gone for a family reunion. For the rest of the year, I recommended poems and stories she might like, and we stayed in touch for years after she graduated.

Contrast this with my experience last semester in a college course I’m teaching. I began reading my students’ response papers to the week’s readings and encountered a particularly astute opening line.

This time I was neither excited nor delighted. Instead, I was wary. I spent the next 15 minutes using a variety of tools to try to figure out if AI wrote the paper.

Almost 60% of teachers believe artificial intelligence is eroding trust between educators and students.

I am not alone. According to an NPR/Ipsos poll, almost 60% of teachers believe artificial intelligence is eroding trust between educators and students. I’ve talked to my university colleagues, as well as the many current high school and middle school teachers I work with, and in the classrooms of America, suspicion pervades. Now when we teachers see great work, we don’t feel pride or wonder or joy. We feel skepticism.

To make matters worse, schools at all levels are inviting the vampire into the house, spending millions on AI products and, in some cases, mandating that teachers incorporate AI use into their curriculum, despite the misgivings of many teachers.

These policy decisions are not happening in a vacuum. Our school districts are a lucrative market for Silicon Valley and have become targets of relentless campaigning.

So, teachers and students end up stuck in a Groundhog Day cycle, as districts continue to pursue the latest technological solution, despite the repeated failure of this strategy.

Cell phones were marketed as a great way to enhance participation and engagement by students — for example, teachers were encouraged to use tools like Poll Everywhere. Now, states are increasingly passing bills banning phones from schools because we recognize their distracting effects.

Then there was the movement to get every student a laptop in class to allow for individualized, work-at-your-own-pace instruction — for example, teachers were encouraged to use video collections like Khan Academy. Now, we are starting to recognize that students staring into screens for seven hours a day isn’t necessarily what we want for our children.

AI companies are making familiar bold claims about how this latest technology will improve learning and revolutionize classrooms with little consideration or acknowledgment of the downsides.

During one of my recent AI conversations, I was reminded by a friend that 25 years ago, American author and educator Neil Postman asked us to be thoughtful when adopting new technology. He told us to ask not only what a new technology will do, but also “What will a new technology undo?”

We have an answer for what AI will undo: AI is spoiling the interactions between students and teachers, undoing the relationship-building that is vital for learning.

There have been and should continue to be vigorous debates about whether and how AI helps or doesn’t help student performance. But we must include in these debates the damaging effects such tools are having on relationships between teachers and students. Those relationships are critically important to learning no matter what technology surrounds them, and we neglect them at our peril.

Jeremy Glazer is a former high school teacher in Philadelphia and Miami, and is currently an associate professor in Rowan University’s College of Education focusing on teacher preparation.