In the past five years, developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology have made incredible leaps and bounds to the point where nearly everybody holds an AI companion inside their pocket, and can access a vast wealth of AI-generated content in an instant. This ease of access to AI means that students in the Old Saybrook High School have used this tool to write essays, do homework, and finish projects. In recent years, as teachers have become aware of the usage of AI in the classroom, they have begun to ask important questions about what the future should hold for these students. Are they learning correctly? Are they processing the information needed in the class? These questions have become more and more prominent as the technology improves and students use it more and more often to take the “easy way” through their classwork.
In the study run by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) 85 percent of teachers and 86% of students were found to have used AI in the 2024-25 school year, which is a number that was originally not too shocking. After further analysis, the worrying statistic is that a very large portion of teachers are using AI in order to teach students. This amount of usage leads to a lot of negative impacts on student learning, such as students having trouble developing meaningful relationships with their teachers, difficulty understanding content as it is taught, and issues with social and emotional development . In the article, “Rising Use of AI in Schools Comes With Big Downsides for Students” by Jennifer Vilcarino & Lauraine Langreo they state that, “Half of the students agree that using AI in class makes them feel less connected to their teachers. A decrease in peer-to-peer connections as a result of AI use is also a concern for teachers (47%) and parents (50%), according to the report.” Artificial Intelligence is growing so fast that schools can’t develop a way to handle the overuse and inevitable consequences.
Old Saybrook High School teacher Kristen Hunter has an interesting point of view on AI and what school might look like in the future with rapidly growing technology. Hunter said that she thinks AI can be a useful tool in the medical and data field, but poses a risk in developing student brains and in learning in the classroom. She also says how he fears that AI has an effect on students’ mental health, saying, “Read an article about AI being a ‘Language Microwave’ in the sense that it makes the brain lazy.” Hunter also claimed that when her students used AI, they did not quite remember or comprehend the content, stating, “People who sat down and used AI to help them generate ideas remembered only some of what they wrote.” Additionally, Hunter questions the value of in-school learning and teachers as AI becomes more and more common as a learning tool when she stated, “We’re not in the business of Copy and Pasting, we’re in the business of helping you learn something.”
With all of these issues being presented, it has become clear to us that something within the school system needs to change drastically in order to prevent artificial intelligence from ruining student development. While we all have different beliefs on how this should be done, we all agree that something must be done. Sean Ludwig believes that the best way to preserve the learning process and the minds of young, developing students is to put all assignments through an AI filter, and make students who use AI redo the assignment on paper for partial credit. This idea would take form in a school-wide policy on AI usage. Beni thinks that AI can be a very helpful tool, but when used in schools it is dangerously limiting our creativity. Hearing from Wyatt Pennington, he says has seen around the school that students have been using AI due to laziness such as writing them essays and doing their homework when that is their time to apply what they had learned in school. AI makes students forget what they learn in class and when it’s time for a test where they don’t have access to Chat GPT and they end up forgetting everything they were supposed to learn and end up cheating or failing.
In conclusion, whether the solution is for schools to find a way to moderate the usage of artificial intelligence or find a way to integrate it into the classroom learning, one of the two needs to be done to keep classrooms up to date and successful in teaching students with rapidly growing technology such as generative AI. This will lead to students having to do their work on their own and applying what they have learned in class, which will further advance their valuable thinking and learning skills, helping them prepare for college, and future life.
