Chatbots sit on our students’ shoulders, gathering information meticulously, whispering advice in their ears – and yet, it often comes up short. Still, GenAI’s hallucinations allow learners and educators to re-centre their thinking, recasting themselves as optimisers of fallible outputs. GenAI can also be used to challenge the untested assumptions of our own stances and approaches. Referencing my own attempts to come to grips with AI “plus/minus” for one class, I’ll show one way forward for instructors interested in short-course design using AI-assisted pedagogy. GenAI can neither judge nor evaluate. Its algorithms simply isolate and aggregate character strings iteratively, based on prior patterns. It also lacks responsiveness to surrounding context. By contrast, teachers and learners debating value propositions via GenAI are best placed to arrive at discoveries in real time in an ongoing process of collective ethical contestation.