---

As part of my service to the community of education scholars, I serve on the editorial boards of a few research journals. Early last summer, I was asked to review an article that had been submitted to one of these journals to be considered for publication. Broadly, the article was about teachers’ uses of AI in their classrooms, and how AI can be leveraged to promote equity. Regardless of the topic or the outcomes of the research, I suspected that, ironically, the article had been written using generative AI. I ran the manuscript through a couple online AI checking tools and received marks of “high confidence” that it had been written with AI.

Rather than being the sole arbiter of the decision to publish or not based on my suspicion, I wrote to the editor of the journal to express my concerns. His response was that he shared the same concerns from his cursory reading of the manuscript, but he sent it to reviewers to see if we would agree with his suspicions.

I read and reviewed the manuscript as I do every time one is assigned to me and ultimately decided that I could not support publication in its current state. I expressed further concerns about the use of GenAI in writing the piece, along with several other points to support my decision.

A few weeks later, as normally happens with this journal, I received a report from the editor of the review outcomes. The other reviewer had expressed some of the structural concerns that I had but decided that the article should be published in its submitted form with only minor revisions.

I’m certainly not alone in this type of experience. This same journal received about 2,000 manuscript submissions in the last year and about 70% of them had something to do with AI. A doctoral student recently reported an abundance of AI-related research presentations at the International Society for Music Education conference in Montreal, providing some evidence that music education researchers and practitioners from around the globe are working with AI, and working on the ethical issues that accompany it. A prominent music education philosopher recently made a call on social media for the formation of a music education task force to consider the issues that AI presents to our field and establish some guidelines for its use.

Considering the ways that AI is impacting the music education research world is, of course, only a small issue among the broader impacts of this technology. There are so many things to consider beyond the issues of originality of writing, originality of thought being perhaps the most concerning. In music, we are already confronting the idea of AI- generated music and whether the music that AI is “trained” on is being ethically used. On a much broader scale, we should consider the environmental impact of AI data centers. My students have expressed this as a chief concern of theirs related to daily use of AI.

In my recent teaching, I have turned to AI for a couple uses that I consider to be reasonable. First, in my music education technology classes, I refer to AI as a useful way to create things like backing tracks for student practice. While my students can do this manually, I offer this simply as a time saver for busy teachers who want to bring a new, interesting technique to their students. Second, my classes engage in songwriting activities every year, and I have noticed that the most difficult part of the process is lyric writing. Since our time for songwriting is limited, and my goal is not to turn my students into master lyricists, I have introduced the idea of using AI to generate lyrics. In this context we discuss using strong prompts to coax AI to generate usable lyrics. We also talk about taking the output of the AI and modifying it in ways that make it sound more like their own songwriting voices. I emphasize that, in my opinion, this is not an acceptable approach for songs that will be written for commercial purposes, but for learning the craft of songwriting, it might be a useful support.

Teachers will have a lot to consider in the school year ahead regarding AI use. Perhaps the attitude we need to develop is that AI is just another technology—albeit an extremely powerful one—that has come along and reshaped our world. Phones and tablets did this recently, and even personal computers within my lifetime. Over time, we learn to manage the ways that new technologies can be leveraged for positive uses, and we learn to monitor uses that oppose our values. At this point in the development of AI, I suggest that we should be actively considering the benefits and drawbacks of its use in our educational contexts and talking openly about how we can leverage it to improve teaching and learning. I look forward to these conversations and to the day when we are having similar ones about the next inevitable evolution of technology.

---