Diogenes Education Shows EARCOS How to Beat AI
Kendal Fortson will speak at EARCOS (the East Asia Regional Council of Schools) in Bangkok, Thailand, on Friday, March 20, 2026, at 2:00 PM. Bringing together international educators from all over Asia, EARCOS is widely respected as a leading organization in international education. The presentation “Use AI. Don’t Become AI,” based on the white paper written by AP Psychology/AP Language/AP Literature teacher Kendal Fortson of Diogenes Education, will share how to prevent student plagiarism from AI, how to harness AI to examine cultural bias, understand connotative word meanings, and use OPVL research tools to prevent students from relying on AI hallucinations. Attendees will learn when to use AI, when to question it, and when to discard its use completely.
Yes, AI Has a Culture
The most interesting thing is how AI can produce bias. “AI definitely has its own cultural lens of the world due to the training data it was presented with. If you psychoanalyze AI, you see how it uses heuristics and has cognitive biases just like people. Students should ask why AI produced the content it does in the same way scholars in critical theory ask why a given author made their choices due their unique place in society and time.”
As a regional presenter for his international school in Guangzhou, China, Kendal Fortson (New Mexico, USA) will be presenting on specific instances in which AI has shown gender and cultural bias, starting with AI translators like Google Translate replacing all instances of female doctors with male gendered language during translations, and how modern LLMs continue the subtle trend. “Students need to be aware of these issues and question them–there’s a place for AI in Psychology classrooms.”
The solution for AI hallucinations
AI is likely to hallucinate facts or take them out of context, as his white paper points out occurred when Google’s Gemini made a claim that actor John Travolta really shot someone in Pulp Fiction because it scrubbed its information from satirical social media accounts. “OPVLs are mandatory now. AI should be used like a search engine, and students need to always go back to the most primary source AI provides them to verify the information.”
AI Prompt Engineering for English Class
Also interesting is analyzing how AI interprets the commands it is given. “It provides very different responses in image generation depending on the connotative meaning of the words. This can be a beneficial tool to help students learn connotation vs denotation, and to expand their skills of descriptive imagery to make AI produce exactly what they want. Prompt Engineering is essentially English instruction.”
Project-Based Learning is Dead
Project-Based Learning is still an important tool in every educator’s toolkit, but how it is implemented has to change. AI has changed the way assessments are given. “Project-Based Learning should only be used as a formative assessment now that AI is in the picture. It’s Project-Based Learning, not Project-Based Assessment. If it doesn’t happen in the classroom, it shouldn’t be given a grade because you can’t be sure AI didn’t create it. Students’ products are no longer what we want to see. We want to know the reasoning for their decisions in a process-based manner. There are new ways to do Project-Based Learning with reflections and ‘thesis-defense’ style actions that now need to be incorporated.”
What are you doing to AI-proof your class rooms? How are you harnassing AI to increase critical thinking rather than produce plagiarism?
Use AI. Don’t Become AI. Get Started with the Fortson Framework for schools.
Use AI. Don’t Become AI – White paper on ResearchGate
AI Classroom Activities: TOK, English, Psychology
