But two years ago, as the latest wave of artificial intelligence began reshaping education, Leskovec told Fortune he was rocked by the explosion of his field into the mainstream. He said Stanford has such a prestigious computer science program he feels as if he “sees the future as it’s being born, or even before the future is born,” but the public release of GPT-3 was jarring.

“We had a big, I don’t know, existential crisis among students a few years back when it kind of wasn’t clear what our role is in this world,” Leskovec said.

He said it seemed like breakthroughs in AI would be exponential to the point where “it will just do research for us, so what do we do?” He said he spent a lot of time talking with students at the PhD level about how to organize themselves, even about what their role in the world would be going forward. It was “existential” and “surprising,” he said. Then, he received another surprise: a student-led request for a change in testing.

“It came out of the group,” he said, especially the teaching assistants, the previous generation of computer science undergraduates. Their idea was simple: “We do a paper exam.”

AI as catalyst for change

Leskovec, a prominent researcher at Stanford whose expertise lies in graph-structured data and AI applications in biology, recounted the pivot with a mixture of surprise and thoughtfulness. Historically, his classes had relied on open-book, take-home exams, where students could leverage textbooks and the internet. They couldn’t use other people’s code and solutions, but the rest was fair game. As large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 exploded onto the scene, students and teaching assistants alike began questioning whether assessments ought to be handled differently.

Now it’s a lot more work for him and his TAs, he said, saying these exams take “much longer” to grade. But they all agreed it was the best way to actually test student knowledge. The age of AI for Leskovec, an AI veteran, has surprised him by putting a higher workload back on himself and other humans. Besides there being “fewer trees in the world” from all the paper he’s printing out, he said AI has just created “additional work.” His 400-person classes feel like an audience at a “rock concert,” but he insisted he’s not turning to AI for help synthesizing and analyzing all the exams.

“No, no, no, we hand grade,” he insisted.

A student-driven solution

Leskovec’s solution sits squarely in the middle of a raging debate about how AI is changing higher education, as reports of rampant cheating have led many colleges to ban the use of AI outright. Other professors are turning back to the paper exam, reviving the famous blue books of many ’90s kids’ memories of high school. One New York University professor even suggested getting “medieval,” embracing ancient forms of testing such as oral and written examination. In the case of Leskovec, the AI professor’s solution for the AI age is likewise to turn away from AI for testing.

When asked if he was worried about students cheating with AI, Leskovec posed another question: “Are you worried about students cheating with calculators? It’s like if you allow a calculator in your math exam, and you will have a different exam if you say calculators are disallowed.” Likening AI to a calculator, he said AI is an amazingly powerful tool that “kind of just emerged and surprised us all,” but it’s also “very imperfect … we need to learn how to use this tool, and we need to be able to both test the humans being able to use the tool and humans being able to think by themselves.”

What is an AI skill and what is a human skill?

Leskovec is wrestling with a question that touches everyone in the workforce: What is a human skill, what is an AI skill, and where do they merge? MIT professor David Autor and Google SVP James Manyika argued in The Atlantic tools like a calculator or AI generally fall into two buckets: automation and collaboration. Think dishwasher, on the one hand, or word processor, on the other. The collaboration tool “requires human engagement” and the issue with AI is that it “does not go neatly into either [bucket].”

The jobs market is sending a message on AI implementation that equates to something like a response from the Magic 8 Ball: “Reply hazy. Try again later.” The federal jobs report has revealed anemic growth since the spring, most recently disappointing expectations with a print of just 22,000 jobs in August. Most economists attribute the lack of hiring to uncertainty about President Donald Trump’s tariff regime, which multiple courts have ruled illegal and appears to be heading to the Supreme Court. But AI implementation is not going smoothly at the corporate level, with an MIT study (not connected to Autor) finding 95% of generative AI pilots are failing, followed shortly after by a Stanford study finding the beginning of a collapse in hiring at the entry level, especially in jobs exposed to automation by AI.

For another perspective, the freelance marketplace Upwork just launched its inaugural monthly hiring report, revealing what non-full-time jobs are being rewarded by the market. The answer is “AI skills” are super in-demand and, even if companies aren’t hiring full-time employees, they are piling into highly paid and highly skilled freelance labor.

Despite a softer overall labor market, Upwork finds companies are “strategically leveraging flexible talent to address temporary gaps in the workforce,” with large businesses driving a 31% growth in what Upwork calls high-value work (contracts greater than $1,000) on the platform. Smaller and medium-sized businesses are piling into “AI skills,” with demand for AI and machine learning leaping by 40%. But Upwork also sees growing demand for the kind of skills that fall in between: a human who is good at collaborating with AI.

Upwork says AI is “amplifying human talent” by creating demand for expertise in higher-value work, most visible across the creative and design, writing, and translation categories. One of the top skills hired for in August was fact-checking, given “the need for human verification of AI outputs.”

Kelly Monahan, managing director of the Upwork Research Institute, said “humans are coming right back in the loop” of working with AI.

“We’re actually seeing the human skills coming into premium,” she said, adding she thinks people are realizing AI hallucinates too much of the time to completely replace human involvement. “I think what people are seeing, now that they’re using AI-generated content, is that they need fact-checking.”

Extending this line of thinking, Monahan said the evolving landscape of “AI skills” shows what she calls “domain expertise” is growing increasingly valuable. Legal is a category that grew in August, she said, highlighting legal expertise is required to fact-check AI-generated legal writing. If you don’t have advanced skills in a particular domain, “it’s easy to be fooled” by AI-generated content, and businesses are hiring to protect against that.

Leskovec agreed when asked about the skills gap that appears to be facing entry-level workers trying to get hired, on the one hand, and companies struggling to effectively implement AI.

“I think we almost need to re-skill the workforce. Human expertise matters much more than it ever did [before].” He added the entry-level issue is “the crux of the problem,” because how are young workers supposed to get the domain expertise required to effectively collaborate with AI?

“I think it goes back to teaching, reskilling, rethinking our curricula,” Leskovec said, adding colleges have a role to play, but organizations do, as well. He asked a rhetorical question: How are they supposed to have senior skilled workers if they’re not taking in young workers and taking the time to train them?

When asked by Fortune to survey the landscape and assess where we are right now in using AI, as students, professors and workers, Leskovec said we are “very early in this.” He said he thinks we’re in the “coming-up-with-solutions phase.” Solutions like a hand-graded exam and a professor finding news ways to fact-check his students’ knowledge.

Yael Har Even, SVP and Country Manager of Oracle Israel told the Calcalist AI Conference that Israel plays a major role in the half-trillion-dollar AI infrastructure Stargate project led by Trump, which is expected to generate tens of billions of dollars for Oracle. She also emphasized that “Israel is our center of innovation in cloud computing and artificial intelligence.” 

In a recent video posted to the AI Bible’s Youtube channel, buildings crumble and terrified-looking people claw their way through the rubble. Horns blare, and an angel appears floating above the chaos. Then come monsters, including a seven-headed dragon that looks like something out of a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook.

The eight-minute video, which depicts a section of the Book of Revelation, is entirely generated by artificial intelligence tools. At times it feels like a high-budget Hollywood movie, at times more like a scene from a video game, and at times like fantasy art. Despite the somewhat muddled visual styles, viewers seem to like what they see – it has racked up over 750,000 views in the two months since it was posted.

The AI Bible is run by Pray.com, a for-profit company that claims to have “the world’s #1 app for faith and prayer.” The new AI videos are being warmly received online, according to Ryan Beck, Pray’s Chief Technology Officer. The viewers are mostly under 30 and skew male, though not too heavily.

“People are starting to write in on our YouTube, telling us how these stories are really transforming their life, how they’re really impacting them spiritually and mentally,” he said.

But theologians are more skeptical. The videos rob the Bible of its power by reducing it to an action movie, said Brad East, a professor of theology at Abilene Christian University in Texas.

“It’s depressing that anyone would think that approach to biblical material was in any way spiritually edifying,” he said.

Almost from the start, Christianity has been interested in using technology to spread the word. Christians were among the first to pioneer the use of handwritten, bound books over scrolls, and later they used the printing press to mass-produce copies of the Bible.

Today, evangelicals in particular are at the forefront of experimenting with technology, said John Dyer, a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary and author of People of the Screen, which traces the history of Biblical software.

The evangelical movement has become a political force in recent decades, but “underneath the hood is a real kind of can-do American spirit of trying stuff,” he said. To him, the AI Bible is the latest example of that willingness to embrace new ways of storytelling. To evangelicals, “if it connects people to the Bible, it’s a good thing.”.

‘The Marvel Universe of faith’

As tools have grown more powerful, AI-generated videos are increasingly part of the social media scene. Some are generating attention-grabbing “slop” for profit, while others are attempting to reimagine historical figures and events.

Religious personalities are among those resurrected by the machines. One humorous video created by comedian Jon Lajoie depicts Jesus sparring with the Easter Bunny in a podcast. Another envisions Mary as an influencer on her way to Bethlehem (“Don’t forget to like and pray!” she quips).

Pray.com had been experimenting with AI-generated images and videos to illustrate Biblical content for a few years before the latest craze began, said Max Bard, the company’s Vice President for Content.

“AI has given us access to all these tools to bring these stories to life,” he said.

But in recent months, Bard said video generation has reached a tipping point where it’s possible to create lots of high-quality content. The company cranks out about two videos per week. “We’re kind of in this groove where we think we really know what people really enjoy and engage with,” he said.

Bard and his team use a huge variety of AI tools, including ChatGPT to develop concepts and still images of what they want the story to look like. Then they record a video in their office on their phone, mimicking the action.

“The cool thing is, you can take that video, put it into the video generator, and it will turn you into Elijah or one of the prophets or what have you,” he said.

They’ve got over two million followers spread across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, with some videos getting millions of views.

“The AI Bible is a way to really bring these stories to life in a way that people have never seen before. Think of if we were like, the Marvel Universe of faith,” he said.

A bad thing to pursue

Theological scholars contacted by NPR gave the videos mixed reviews.

“It does have the Marvel, sort of videogame, Marvel aesthetic in all the worst ways,” added Brad East. “Like that’s a bad thing to pursue.”

“I think that the package, the form, situates the Bible as entertainment, as content to be titillated or amused by… Rather than a word that is a divine revelation intended to transform our lives and bring them into accordance with truth, with God and with one another,” said Jeffrey Bilbro, a professor of English and Grove City College in Pennsylvania who has written on Christians’ relationship to AI.

Others are more receptive to the videos.

“I’m always a fan of anything that drives interest in the story of the Holy Scripture or in the Bible,” said Rev. Dr. Paul Hoffman, a professor in the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Hoffman did however wonder about the decision to animate some of the more difficult-to-interpret parts of the Bible, like the Book of Revelation, and the story of the Nephilim in the Old Testament.

A still from an AI-generated video depicting parts of the Book of Revelation. The images generated by AI often looks like fantasy art.

Courtesy Pray.com

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Courtesy Pray.com

“Some of what they’re doing is taking things that are, within Christian scholarship, debatable,” he said. “Maybe that’s part of the marketing plan.”

The medium matters, East said. For Christians, the Bible is the word of God, and turning that word into short-form viral content robs it of its power. He also pointed out that many of the most important stories don’t fit the epic plotlines the AI Bible likes to highlight:

“When do we get simply watching Jesus say, turn the other cheek? That’s not going to be much of an action movie trailer.”

Pray.com’s Ryan Beck said this isn’t AI slop. Care and time is put into each video. The images may be AI, but the voices are real actors, and the music is composed especially for each episode. A pastor reads the scripts, which often closely follow the biblical verses they describe. At the same time he said the content is meant as “edutainment”.

“We want to gear on the side of entertainment,” he said, “because we think especially biblical content is over-indexed to educational.”