Over the past 20 years, the authors have designed an interdisciplinary approach that integrates Arts-based methods into STEM education. This integrated STEAM education perspective is particularly useful for enabling students to develop (i) not only their traditional scientific (and mathematical) understanding of the outer world but also (ii) their critical reflective understanding and capabilities as societal change agents (Taylor & Taylor, 2022). This integrated curricular approach employs an arts-based teaching and learning method called 'ethical dilemma story pedagogy' (Settelmaier, 2003) that is described in this article. Running parallel to the authors' interest in developing STEM students' (and teachers') higher-order abilities as change agents for resolving sustainable development ethical dilemmas, is the rapidly developing issue of the global role of artificial intelligence (AI) in transforming the world, in both ethically sound and unsound ways (Lorenz et al., 2023; Nam & Bai, 2023). As John--a highly experienced science teacher--started experimenting with the AI tool of ChatGPT (Open AI, undated) to help design his mathematics instruction the authors were interested in its potential for enabling him to develop an ethical dilemma story approach for use in his mathematics class. Of broader significance, the authors wanted to investigate the potential of this AI tool for use by all mathematics teachers interested in preparing their students as change agents for a deeply troubled world. This article recounts in personal narrative form (Reed-Danahay, 1997) John's 'reflective practitioner inquiry' (Schon, 2017; Simanjorang et al., 2022) into his endeavour to employ ChatGPT for this novel purpose.