The ‘Tragic Dilemma’ of GenAI in Education: An Exploratory Human-AI Conversation

This article seeks to add nuance to the frequently negative tone of tertiary educators’ discussions about Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). It does so by reframing the ‘tragic dilemma’ of online learning, as accentuated by GenAI, through the lens of the PERMA-V model of positive psychology. Over three months in 2025, five educators and one GenAI chatbot, Anthropic’s Claude, engaged in a series of conversational turns exploring the six dimensions of PERMA-V as they apply to GenAI in Higher Education (HE). Key themes emerging from the conversation included the ability of GenAI to contribute usefully in limited, specific ways to education when employed within the guardrails of a careful and mindful human-AI approach that always foregrounds the human context and human collaboration, and that leverages human emotional, critical, and creative capabilities. Claude was found to be an obliging if somewhat limited interlocutor, with a tendency to adhere to generalities and make superficial and sometimes questionable links to wider academic discourse, but with an ability to summarize points well and to generate surprisingly apt turns of phrase highlighting important ideas. While the conversation revealed positive roles for GenAI in HE, it reinforced the ongoing importance of seemingly negative conversations expressing significant concerns over the educational, societal, and environmental implications of GenAI.