Ep. 9 - Kyle Brun: It's Just the Internet Now

What happens when an entire school district decides to lean in?

In Episode 9 of The Line, we sit down with Dr. Kyle Brun — assistant principal at Garnet Valley School District, adjunct professor, and the man who saved Sean from his 100% Turnitin AI detection score. Kyle brings something we haven't heard from any guest yet: a complete absence of hesitation. For Kyle, AI isn't a tool he decides to use — it's embedded in his professional life the way the internet is. He talks to ChatGPT on his drive home. He uses it to check his blind spots before difficult parent meetings. He doesn't deliberate about whether to use it. He just does.

But Kyle's story is bigger than his own practice. Garnet Valley has gone district-wide: paid ChatGPT accounts for every teacher, plus tools like Napkin AI, GoPol, and Magic School AI. Their director of technology works directly with OpenAI's education advisory group. They've built digital citizenship lessons from kindergarten through twelfth grade and adopted a stoplight system for student AI use. And the culture isn't top-down mandate — it's collective buy-in rooted in a district identity that has always leaned toward innovation.

So where's the line? Kyle says there really isn't one — until we bring up AI girlfriends and parasocial AI relationships. That's where all three of us hit a wall we didn't need to think about.

In the debrief, Matthew and Sean unpack what it means when AI becomes habit in the phenomenological sense — not routine but incorporated into how someone moves through their work. Matthew pushes back hard on "cognitive debt" language, arguing through the analogy of a blind person's cane that what's happening is cognitive extension, not loss. And the conversation opens into a broader reckoning with binary thinking itself — drawing on Kieran Egan's cognitive tools, Michel Serres, and the idea that "AI is good" versus "AI is bad" is a frame we need to outgrow if we're going to have honest conversations about what's actually happening in schools. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.