Will AI Replace Teachers? I Interviewed the 3 Most Popular AI Tools

When ChatGPT entered our lives, I was reluctant to start using it. I had concerns about many things. Lots of people in education were asking, “Will AI replace teachers?” Mine wasn’t that question — it was more about privacy, how to teach its use to large groups, and how it might be misused. Then, as a teacher trainer, I felt a responsibility to experiment with it. After a few chats and trials, I decided to interview the tool about what it was, and I posted my first AI interview in January 2023.

Now, in 2026, AI tools are everywhere, embedded in almost every website, and things are happening so fast that we are using them frantically most of the time. We sometimes lose control and feel the urge to ask ChatGPT instead of thinking or planning on our own. We enjoy how it takes the lead for us while simultaneously fearing that it will replace our jobs.

I can’t say how we will continue our existence together, but I believe we need to find a better balance and lean on AI as a tool rather than replacing our own judgement, thinking skills, or brains.

As a teacher, I’m constantly trying to find ways it can empower me and help my students. However, as I use it and witness how quickly things are changing, I find it impossible to imagine exactly where we are heading. My way of thinking, shaped largely by the 20th century, is ready to adapt, but it cannot make predictions. One thing I am sure of is that schools have existed since ancient times and will continue to exist.

After the Industrial Revolution, we arrived at the education systems we have today. Those systems have remained largely unchanged for almost two centuries, but they now need to evolve. The foundations need to be reconsidered, as do the layers built on top of them, particularly vocational schools, higher education, and, in short, the institutions that prepare young people for professions. The profession a student trains for today may become obsolete within six months, a year, or two years. Therefore, we need other options that prepare individuals to adjust, adapt, learn, and relearn throughout their lives.

With all this in mind, I decided to interview some of the most popular AI tools in our lives today and ask them a simple question: What will happen to higher education? Without changing a word, I’m pasting their answers here.

Enjoy!

ChatGPT:

Eva: Can I interview you for a post?

ChatGPT: Absolutely. You can treat me as an interview subject and ask questions one at a time or send a whole list. I can answer from several different angles, depending on what you’re writing:

• As ChatGPT (how I work, what I can and can’t do, what it’s like to interact with millions of people).
• As an AI writing assistant (writing, creativity, editing, blogging, teaching materials, content creation).
• As an AI in education (teachers, language learning, IELTS, lesson planning, AI literacy).
• As a broader reflection on AI’s role in work, learning, reading, creativity, and society.

One small caveat: I can’t claim personal experiences, emotions, memories, or consciousness. If you ask, “What does it feel like to be ChatGPT?” I’ll answer by explaining how I function rather than pretending to have feelings. Go ahead with the first question.

Eva: Thanks! Please give me short answers. Not AI style. Give me the gist.

ChatGPT: Got it. I’ll keep answers:

• Short (a few sentences at most)
• Plain English
• No AI jargon unless it’s necessary
• More like a thoughtful interviewee than a technical manual

And if a question doesn’t have a simple answer, I’ll give you the core idea rather than a long explanation. Fire away.

Eva: What will be the impact of Generative AI on schools in the next 5 years?

ChatGPT: The biggest change won’t be technology. It’ll be expectations. Schools will gradually stop treating information recall as the main goal and put more emphasis on thinking, questioning, creating, and evaluating. Teachers who learn to work with AI will save time on routine tasks and spend more time on actual teaching. The challenge won’t be stopping students from using AI. It’ll be helping them use it well.

Eva: The classic question 🙂 Will AI replace teachers in the near future?

ChatGPT: No. AI can explain, generate, quiz, and even give feedback. But schools are full of human situations, not just learning tasks. Teachers motivate, notice, encourage, manage, adapt, and build relationships. AI will change teaching. It won’t replace the need for teachers. The more routine parts of the job are at risk, not the human ones.

Eva: What is your suggestion for sustainable higher education systems?

ChatGPT: Higher education needs to stop trying to do everything. Universities should focus on what they do best: helping people think deeply, work with others, and make sense of complex ideas. Information is now everywhere. Guidance, community, and intellectual challenge are harder to find. A sustainable system is one that values learning as much as credentials and can adapt faster than the world changes around it.

Eva: How do we train critical thinking and creative processing when knowledge is so easy to reach?

ChatGPT: By making students do something with knowledge instead of simply finding it. The valuable skills now are comparing ideas, spotting weaknesses, asking better questions, making connections, and creating something new from existing information. When answers become easy to access, the quality of the questions matters more.

Gemini:

Eva: Can I interview you for a post?

Gemini: I would be absolutely honored! Whether it’s for your blog, a newsletter, or a professional feature, I’m ready. How would you like to handle it? You can fire away with your questions right here all at once, or we can do it conversational style, one question at a time. Let me know what you’re working on, and we can get started whenever you’re ready!

Eva: What will be the impact of Generative AI on schools in the next 5 years?

Gemini: “We are shifting from information delivery to guided inquiry. AI will take over routine admin work like grading and lesson drafting, freeing teachers to focus on mentorship, emotional support, and teaching critical AI literacy so students learn to question the tools they use.”

Eva: Will AI replace teachers in the near future?

Gemini: “No. Information is a commodity now, but true teaching is a deeply relational process. AI lacks empathy, cannot read the emotional room of a classroom, and cannot foster community. AI won’t replace teachers, but teachers who use AI will replace those who don’t.”

Eva: What is your suggestion for sustainable higher education systems?

Gemini: “Universities must stop being content libraries and become agile training grounds. When specific skills become obsolete in three years, degrees must pivot to teaching meta-skills—metacognition, critical thinking, and adaptability—while offering flexible, lifelong micro-credentials.”

Eva: How do we train critical thinking and creative processing when knowledge is so easy to reach?

Gemini: “By focusing on the process rather than the final product. We need to design interactive, ‘AI-resistant’ tasks—like localized problem solving or classroom debates—and bring AI into the room as a flawed peer for students to critique, edit, and evaluate.”

Claude:

Eva: Can I interview you for a post on education?

(Thought for 3s)

Claude: I’d love that! Happy to be your interview subject for a change. What angle are you thinking for the post — something about AI in language teaching generally, or more specifically about what it’s like using Claude as a teacher/content creator?

Eva: Thanks! More general. Please give me short answers. Not AI style. Give me the gist. (Thought for 3s)

Claude: Sounds good. Fire away, I’ll keep it tight and real.

Eva: What will be the impact of Generative AI on schools in the next 5 years? (Thought for 1s)

Claude: Biggest shift: teachers stop being the main source of information and become the ones who make sense of it. Lesson planning, differentiation, first-draft feedback… AI eats a lot of the grunt work. The risk is schools mistaking speed for learning. Kids can generate an essay in ten seconds, so the whole point of writing to think gets threatened if teachers don’t redesign tasks.

Assessment changes hardest. In-class, oral, process-based work comes back because take-home essays stop meaning much. Teacher training becomes the bottleneck. Most systems will move slower than the tech, so the gap between well-resourced schools and everyone else probably widens before it narrows.

Eva: The classic question 🙂 Will AI replace teachers in the near future?

Claude: No. Not the near future, maybe not ever, for a simple reason: teaching isn’t information delivery, it’s relationship plus judgment. Knowing why Ahmet went quiet today, when to push a shy student and when to back off, reading a room, that’s not a data problem. What AI replaces is the parts of teaching that were already mechanical. Marking, generating worksheets, explaining the same grammar point for the fifth time. Good riddance to some of that, honestly.

The real risk isn’t replacement, it’s replacement of judgment by admin. If schools use AI to standardize and de-skill teachers rather than free them up, that’s the bad timeline. Not the tech’s fault, the policy choices around it.

Eva: What is your suggestion for sustainable higher education systems?

(Deliberated on crafting concise, substantive response approach)

Claude: Fund lifelong learning, not just 18-22 year olds. The economic case for the four-year-degree-then-done model is weakening fast, so systems need to be built for people coming back at 30, 40, 50. Stop competing on prestige and start competing on outcomes. Too much of higher ed spending goes into rankings games, rather than teaching quality or actually getting people employed.

Blend online and in-person properly, not as an afterthought. Cost pressure isn’t going away, and pretending everything must happen on a physical campus is expensive nostalgia. Tie funding to public good, not just enrollment numbers. Research and teacher training especially need protection from pure market logic, or you get short-term thinking everywhere.

And honestly: fewer, better-supported programs beats sprawling ones nobody can staff properly.

Eva: How do we train critical thinking and creative processing when knowledge is so easy to reach? (

Deliberated on meta-instruction validity versus substantive thinking content)

Claude: Make struggle part of the design again. If AI can answer instantly, the task has to live in the messy middle, not the answer itself. Ask for the reasoning, the comparison, the “what’s wrong with this answer” not just the answer.

Teach students to interrogate sources, including AI ones. Not “is this true” but “why does this source say this, who benefits, what’s missing.” That’s the actual critical thinking muscle. Bring back oral defense of ideas. Talking through your thinking live is much harder to fake than a written product, and it forces actual understanding. Creativity needs constraints, not freedom. “Write anything” invites AI slop. “Write a story with no dialogue” or “explain this using only kitchen metaphors” forces original thinking because there’s no easy template to lift.

Will AI Replace Teachers? Is This the Question?

I hope you’ve enjoyed the interview. I don’t know what answers other people would get to the same questions, since these three tools know quite well what I read and write about, so maybe they tailored their answers accordingly. Even so, these are genuinely good answers. We may not be able to answer “Will AI replace teachers?” for certain at the moment, but one thing I’m pretty sure of is that things will be a lot different for our students as they build their lives.

Professions can change or disappear within a year or two now, so the most important thing we can teach isn’t what we have on the curriculum, but the ability to keep adjusting. Knowledge always matters, but it is no longer enough. We need to teach critical thinking and creative thinking more. In a world that keeps reinventing itself, the ability to adjust, adapt, and relearn may be the most important skill of all.

If you’d like to read further, UNESCO’s Teacher Task Force released a paper this year making the same core argument as all three AI tools above: that teachers are not replaceable, and it calls for embedding this principle into governance frameworks for AI in education (read it here). For a broader look at where global policy is heading, UNESCO’s AI in Education hub and its AI Competency Framework for Teachers are worth reading too.