Artificial intelligence has become the question everyone in Catholic education feels obligated to address. But beneath the anxiety about cheating, policies, and classroom management lies a much more fundamental issue: What is education actually for? When AI can generate essays, art, music, lesson plans, and arguments instantly, it forces us to confront a confusion that long predates ChatGPT—the temptation to treat the product of learning as the point, rather than the formation of the person doing the learning.
In this episode, I’m joined by John Brahier of Longbeard, the parent company of Magisterium AI. Drawing on his experience as a former Catholic educator and his close engagement with recent Vatican teaching, John helps us think clearly—and calmly—about AI in schools. We discuss Pope Leo’s recent document on Catholic education, why Catholic schools must avoid both technophobia and digital reductionism, and how technologies inevitably shape not just what students do, but who they are becoming.
John argues that the deepest risks of AI in education are not primarily about cheating, but about mirroring, disruption, and distortion: mirroring, as AI subtly trains us to measure ourselves against machines; disruption, as it short-circuits the slow, iterative processes by which real learning happens; and distortion, as it reinforces the idea that education exists to produce outputs rather than to form persons. Along the way, we consider what responsible AI use might look like for students versus teachers, why education cannot be reduced to content delivery, and why relational, communal formation remains the heart of Catholic education—no matter how powerful our tools become.
Music by Braden Kuntz
