The Teen Building A Better Kind Of School AI

Bowe Lubin, a 17 year old from California, kept seeing the same thing happen at school. ChatGPT and Claude were against the rules, but students used them anyway. And increasingly, they were using them before they opened a textbook, searched a database or asked a librarian.Lubin explained to me that he could understand the concern from teachers. There was the obvious issue of cheating, but also the dilemma of when an AI tool does too much of the work, what happens to the thinking students were supposed to be doing in the first place?Simply banning the tools did not seem to solve much. So he decided to build a different kind of one.Lubin is a senior at Polytechnic School in Pasadena. Outside school, he is interested in public policy and plays basketball. History, though, has been his favorite subject for years. In May 2025, he began building Historia, a nonprofit AI research librarian designed to help students find and investigate sources without producing the piece of work they eventually submit.“Really, it has been me, my laptop, and development tools such as Claude Code,” Lubin told me.What interests me is the constraint he has chosen to build around. Most AI products compete by showing how much they can do for you, whereas Historia is partly built around what it will not do.Students Are Already Using AIThe argument over whether students should use AI is increasingly detached from what students are actually doing.Pew Research Center surveyed 1,458 American teenagers and found that 54% had used chatbots for schoolwork. One in ten said chatbots did all or most of the work. Some 59% said AI related cheating was a regular occurrence at their school.Students themselves also appear to recognize some of the risks. Among teenagers who expected AI to have a negative effect on society, concerns included becoming dependent on the technology and losing the ability to think critically or generate ideas independently. That is the tension schools are trying to deal...