“ChatGPT Says You’re Wrong!” How Generative AI Exposes the Fragility of Explanation-Centered Pedagogy

In this essay, we examine a growing tension in management education revealed when students use generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT to question and challenge their educators. We argue that these encounters expose a contest over educational authority. Management education has long relied on explanation-centered pedagogy, allowing authority to rest on theoretical articulation rather than on the demonstrable development of students’ judgment and capability to act. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) destabilizes this arrangement by making fluent explanation ubiquitous, inexpensive, and readily contestable. Our provocation is that business schools have misdiagnosed this as primarily a technological problem when it more fundamentally reveals the fragility of explanation-based authority. We contribute by explaining how explanation became a scalable and defensible proxy for forms of managerial capability that are difficult to observe and assess, and why generative AI now devalues that currency. We call for authority to be rebuilt around capability-oriented education organized at the program level, with theory repositioned as a resource for interpreting, guiding, challenging, and evaluating action. This requires coordinated work by educators, program leaders, deans, and university administrators to make students’ developing capabilities visible, cumulative, and assessable.