Editor’s note: At School News Network, we believe that to truly tell the stories that need to be told, we should first and foremost elevate students’ ideas, opinions and experiences. This spring, we spoke with a panel of 10 high-schoolers from nine of the districts we cover — urban, suburban and rural — to get their thoughts on what high school, and everyday life, is like for them.
This is the fifth installment of six parts of our conversation; this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Part 1: What is high school like for you?
Part 2: How much do mental-health stressors complicate the high-school experience?
Part 3: Do you feel safe at school?
Part 4: Are you feeling the effects of political polarization at your school?
All districts — The revolutionary technology of artificial intelligence — better known as AI — increasingly permeates society, and schools are no exception. From engineering and health care to composition and counseling, AI is rapidly changing the way we communicate, work and live. We asked our student roundtable how AI is affecting how they learn, and how they see it being helpful or harmful to them and their peers.
SNN: A lot of adults like me are worried about AI because we’re afraid it’s going to replace us. What do you think of AI, and how do you use it in your studies?
Andrew, senior: “I’m in (Kent Career Tech Center) IT fundamentals (class), so I’ve had to look into that field for projects. And yeah, it’s moving fast, but it’s not going to be as big of a concern as people think it’s gonna be. It also just comes down to, how are we gonna apply it? Because you could have AI make maps, and that could just take away a tiny bit of a job that nobody wants to do, and then you could have more people go into another field. Or you (could) make tour guides. There we go. Who wants to make tour guides or print those out, or do the design for that? So you just have AI do that. And so it’s all about the ethics of how we should use AI in school.”
Jackson, junior: “At our school, people have used it so much that they just banned it. You can’t get to any AI. We tried to go around it. Like, something someone found was (called) ‘cat GPT,’ and it literally said ‘meow.’ They responded with ‘meow,’ and they blocked that. They blocked everything with AI. People use it on tests. I’ve seen people, on their computer they have AI, they just copy and paste the whole test.”
Ellison, senior: “When we test online, we have a thing called Securly. It locks you into your browser.”
Jackson, junior: “Some teachers do that, and some teachers are too lazy. They’ll come out and say, like, ‘Yeah, I know most (teachers) are doing it on lockdown browser. I don’t want to. Just don’t cheat.’ Then someone on our midterm exam got caught using it, and they copied and pasted the whole test. Oh, and there was an assignment in our English class, it was AP (Language). Fifty people got caught using Chat GPT on it. They gave them all zeroes. [‘Are you serious?’ another student interjects.] Then they just blocked Chat GPT.”
Andrew, senior: “My AP Lang class last year had a similar thing where … they made them redo the test. But they still got a zero (on their) work because they cheated to begin with. [laughter] Like, ‘You already cheated, but we have to be able to make sure that this (class knows what) they’re doing and how to write the essay.”
Anari, senior: “I feel like that’s our problem now, like, as a generation, we’re just so lazy. We just love social media and technology and all this and that. Honestly, I feel like a lot of people in my school that cheat just have no brain. Literally like brain rot. I’m not even joking. It’s not even funny.”
Jackson, junior: “People get so lazy that … if they put an answer in an essay .. they can’t even change a word. They’re so lazy, they just copy and paste the answers in there.”
Anari, senior: “It’s just so sad. I feel like, just watching us, we’re just so addicted, and it’s just, like, showing we’re getting set up for failure.”
Chay’ce, junior: “It’s progressively getting worse. Because my freshman year, we weren’t doing much of that.”
Ellison, senior: “No, I don’t remember anything like that. It came up, like, last year.”
Chay’ce, junior: “As classes get harder, (with) people realizing that they don’t want to go to college, it’s the thing that they do. And some people, even in college — I think that’s the biggest thing, (being in) a college class, a legitimate college class, and you’re using AI, and I’m just like, so …” [chuckles]
Ellison, senior: “I feel like we’ve all seen the TikToks of, like, nurses using AI.”
Ella, senior: “I’ve even had teachers admit, ‘Yeah, AI wrote my lesson for today.”
Chay’ce, junior: “I know it’s a tool, but using it for higher-standard institutions … I feel like you can’t control it. Because I will be in my psych class, my college psych class, and she’ll give us a take-home test. So if kids are going home, they’re probably just gonna take a picture of it. There’s no integrity, holding yourself accountable for how you want to even be perceived by yourself.”
SNN: In what ways have you found it to be useful and helpful?
Jadon, junior: “I have a really good one for this. I’m currently writing my research paper; it’s very good at looking through JSTOR and finding relatable sources. But I’ll say this again: We all want to try to get better. The people that don’t are going to copy and paste. But using it to outline, or how would the flow be better? It can give really good feedback, using it as feedback or to find sources, which then you dig through yourself, which is what I’ve done, it’s been really, really beneficial. My teacher is okay with that. It’s just like Google, but, what, 30, 20 years later? (We used) to find sources, papers, in the library; now you search them (online). It’s the same thing, just better. It’s just another jump. But the trick is, it thinks for you, and that’s what it’s supposed to do, is think for you. But you can make it think in a different way to then benefit you.”
Jackson, junior: “I’ve also used it in my AP (chemistry) class; I’m lost half the time because the teacher is too smart for us. He just skips over stuff. [‘That’s the worst,’ another student interjects.] He’s like, ‘Oh, I thought you know how to do that.’ So I’ve definitely used it to explain to me how to do stuff. Like, relearning things. (AI will) teach step by step. And it helps.”
Jadon, junior: “The lazy people are going to be lazy. But you can use it in a beneficial way.”
Chay’ce, junior: “I feel like it’ll come to a halt. It’ll come to a point where you can’t use these things in your job and stuff.”
Jadon, junior: “Things are just gonna get better. I love SpaceX, okay? So they’re landing rockets now. Well, that couldn’t happen 20 years ago. People tend to think, ‘You have to learn it this way, because that’s the way we’ve been learning for 15 years.’ Well now it’s just going to be, we’re going to do bigger and better things, because we have these resources. We’ll think on different levels.”
SNN: So, using it as a support for your own learning, not letting it learn and do the work for you?
Andrew, senior: “As long as you’re (giving) me a step-by-step guide or something like that. I did that today because I had to figure out how to code something, because I could never code before. It was like, figure it out yourself. And so I was able to have it break down the steps I needed to do. The way it broke it down for me, I couldn’t understand, so it broke it down to make it even simpler. You can make it as challenging as you need it to be, to help it break down the steps for you that you need.”
Ellison, senior: “It’s just a super-complex issue where there’s always going to be goods, there’s always going to be bad. I think it is a super-valuable tool for exploring technology in the future. It’s going to be an integral part of our future lives, in some way or another, even if we’re not engineers and stuff. But there’s also just so many things that could use some kind of ethical restrictions on them. Because I know people who’ve gotten to college, good colleges, using AI essays. That’s crazy! That is just not a representation of human achievement. So there are boundaries, like many things. And, I don’t know, a good place of starting to set those boundaries might just be taking them out of secondary education, like high school and college. Unless it’s for a course that’s like coding. Absolutely, AI is an important part of coding. That’s different. An English class, AI isn’t really needed there.”
Andrew, senior: “You know, ChatGPT kind of sucks. I’ve tried it for Shakespeare. It doesn’t work that well.”
Ellison, senior: “Or like art, where it never quite resolves itself. [laughter] You look at the bottom and none of them have feet. It’s just not the same as a human mind. So even if it’s a difficult thing to just give up something that’s so easy, it might have to come to that someday.”
Chay’ce, junior: “In my college stuff, when we submit stuff, they do have, like, an AI finder, though. So I bet you that’ll advance somewhere.”
Andrew, senior: “As AI advances, so will those programs, and they’re just gonna go hand in hand. When AI advances, so will all those programs, and it’s just gonna keep going back and forth. And there’s nothing we can do about that.”
Next installment: How could school be a better experience?
