There are abundant optimistic and pessimistic views about the potential educational impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. The optimists envision that AI will enable teachers to do more of what only teachers can do for their students: build caring and trusting relationships; understand students' needs, backgrounds, and cultures; guide and inspire their learning; and prepare them for their futures. In this vision, AI partners with teachers to provide customized learning resources, digital tutors, and new learning experiences while addressing students' individual needs. It helps address long-standing opportunity and achievement gaps among student groups. Overall, it sparks reforms that go beyond increasing the efficiency of current practices, enabling significant improvements in the quality of teaching and learning so all students are prepared to succeed in the rapidly changing world. The pessimists envision that students using AI will spend more time interacting with digital agents than with human teachers and peers. In this view, AI educational resources are rife with biases, misinformation, oversimplification, and formulaic, boring presentations. It sees students misusing AI to do their work for them, resulting in a lack of engagement and productive learning. It sees AI enlarging equity gaps and jeopardizing students' privacy and security. It sees policymakers replacing teachers with AI to address funding shortfalls. Overall, the fearful vision is that AI will lead to the dehumanization of education. Education leaders and policymakers will need to consider the differing views in order to harness the potential and mitigate the hazards presented by the advances in AI technologies.