Everywhere is AI
Dr. Leigh Fauber
In his nonfiction book Everything is Tuberculosis, John Green argues that tuberculosis is not only a disease of the body, but a pervasive and often hidden force that has shaped the world we live in. Tuberculosis has left its mark on human history, culture, medicine, inequality, and migration. Green traces its influence from the discovery of germ theory and the development of vaccines to the settlement of the American Southwest and even the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of World War I.
Green does not ask us to see tuberculosis as “everything” in a literal sense. He asks us to see how one reality can become entangled with nearly everything. And by the book’s conclusion, he reminds us that if human choices have helped write the history of this curable disease, then human choices must also determine its future.
That got me thinking about AI.
AI is not a disease, and it is not tuberculosis. But Green’s book made me think about what happens when something becomes so woven into the conditions of daily life that we stop noticing how much it is shaping us, even in the most mundane ways. Need AI to auto-fill a sentence you’re writing in Gmail? No problem. Need it to recommend a new book? It’ll give you three. Need it to translate a phrase from English into Hebrew? It’ll do that, too, with vowels, transliteration, and a note about context, if you ask.
Before we realize it, that convenience becomes part of how we learn, work, create, and think. We also see AI’s influence in the tools students use to search and write and in the questions teachers are now asking about assessment, integrity, and what learning is really for.
As I walked through campus during our spring siyyum (culmination of learning), I noticed how this abstract conversation had become part of our students’ real intellectual lives. AI was not simply happening “out there.” It had arrived, for example, through the Masa capstone projects our students were pursuing. A few years ago, our senior science researchers presented on topics like “Mitophagy and Stem Cell Reprogramming” and “Classification of HFOs via Convolutional Neural Networks.” This year, by contrast, I saw multiple presentations that placed AI at the center: “Investment Risk Optimization Algorithm Design,” “Generative Artificial Intelligence Model for Simulating Structural Brain Changes in Schizophrenia,” and “Teaching AI to Play Snake.” AI had become deeply embedded in how students were imagining serious academic work.
But not everything is AI, of course. Learning, empathy, and curiosity are deeply human experiences. The moment when a child finally understands something, when a class discussion takes an unexpected turn, when a student feels seen by an adult who knows them well — these are not artificial. They are what makes us human and what builds a joyful kehillah (community).
Like other school communities, we have wrestled with how to respond to this new technological reality, but we knew our response could not be only practical or procedural. It had to be rooted in Jewish tradition, values, and ethics.
One moment from a faculty training helped clarify our approach. The facilitator invited us to move from asking, is this cheating?, to asking, is this learning? This mental shift did not dismiss concerns about academic integrity, which existed before AI entered the picture, but it widened the conversation from detection and rules to design, purpose, evidence, and student growth.
It also connected deeply to a Jewish understanding of learning as process over product. Torah study is not only about arriving at an answer; it asks us to slow down, question, argue, return to the text, sit with ambiguity, and discover meaning through encounter. In the age of AI, that means we have to pay closer attention to whether students remain intellectually present in their own work. A polished paragraph, solution, or D’var Torah (words of Torah) can now appear in seconds, but the product is not the same as the learning.
And so we began thinking about how to create greater friction in student thinking and writing as a way of preserving the kind of productive struggle that forms a thinker: drafts, conferences, annotations, outlines, reflections, oral explanations, and opportunities for students to show how their thinking changed. These choices are pedagogical, but they are also theological and ethical; they reflect what we believe learning is for and what kind of human beings we hope our students become.
That is why I was struck by a phrase in Prizmah’s AI issue: “Putting the AI in JudAIsm.” I appreciate the playfulness of the phrase and the possibility behind it, and I want to push it one step further. Let’s place Judaism around AI. That distinction matters. If AI becomes the wrapper around school, then the technology defines the questions: What can it do? How fast can it do it? How do we keep up?
But if Jewish values become the wrapper around AI, then different questions emerge: Does this deepen learning or bypass it? Does it expand access or create dependence? Does it cultivate emet, kavod habriyot (human dignity), and areivut (responsibility to self and others)? Does it strengthen our kehillah (community)? Does it help us form the kind of human beings our school exists to nurture?
Like tuberculosis in Green’s telling, AI has been shaped by human choices, and its future will be shaped by them as well. As Jewish educators, we have an obligation to teach students that tools are powerful, but not neutral. That efficiency can be useful, but not the same as wisdom. And that the purpose of school is not only to produce excellent work, but to form human beings capable of doing excellent work with integrity and Jewish values at the center.
Dr. Leigh Fauber is Head of Curriculum and Integration at Milken Community School. With over 20 years in independent schools, she has served in roles ranging from science department chair to middle school division head, giving her a broad perspective on how schools operate and evolve. She leads curriculum design, faculty learning, and schoolwide innovation.
