At my high school no one is talking about AI

But everyone is using it

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The Important Work is a space for writing instructors at all levels—high school, college, and beyond—to share reflections about teaching writing in the era of generative AI. As many of us head back into the classroom, it seems like a good time to bring students into our conversation as well. This week’s post is by Sam Barber. Sam is a high school student in Massachusetts.

If you’re interested in sharing a reflection for The Important Work, you can find all the information here. —Jane Rosenzweig

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Near the end of my sophomore year in high school, a classmate of mine received extra credit on an English essay using AI-generated text. I could tell it was AI just by hearing it read aloud from across the classroom, but my teacher praised the student for her creativity and she got her extra credit points. Another time, I was working on a group project with someone who generated all of his writing with AI and he received the same grade as me for work that was not his.

Even when they’re not using AI tools to cheat, it feels like almost everyone at my high school uses AI in some capacity for their schoolwork. I've seen people use it to help study for tests or explain difficult concepts and even generate entire paragraphs for English class. Many of my friends who don't use it to generate writing will use it as a study guide for harder classes. Someone I know made a practice test for the AP US History exam with ChatGPT, and after taking it, I noticed that several of the answers it gave were incorrect. It bothers me that there is clear evidence that these AI models are not reliable sources of information, and yet people continue to use them to study.

Reihaneh Golpayegani & The Bigger Picture / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

I understand that some people have found AI helpful for studying. It’s good that people can find ways to understand material that they are struggling with, but students blindly trusting that AI will always be a reliable source for this sort of thing could lead to them getting wrong information. And right now, no one is teaching us how to judge whether it’s reliable.

I think that using AI for school writing vastly diminishes students' ability to think critically and problem solve. The valuable learning you get out of a research paper won't be the information you research; it'll be the way in which you figure out how to find, organize, and present that information. Creating an AI-generated paper in five seconds will deprive you of all of that. Getting the assignment done without thinking might get you an A, but only by actually doing the work will you develop important skills that using AI will not give you. I don’t remember every topic that I researched in the past two years, but what I did learn is how to find reliable sources and figure out what questions I have and how to answer them.

I'm deeply bothered by the fact that using AI seems to be becoming the norm: I've seen people react in surprise when someone says they don't use it, and people who have it open constantly on their computers, ready to use it to generate entire English assignments without batting an eye. It worries me that high school students are unable to write a three-page essay and resort instead to AI to do it for them, because I saw people doing writing on their own before AI was so widespread, and I’m worried that the easy shortcut of using AI is causing people to lose those skills. If we keep going this way, we might end up graduating without even noticing that we’re not having thoughts of our own.

Part of me understands why people are using it. Many of the assignments we are being assigned at my school are not engaging enough. For example, when faced with an essay on the symbolism of a book, something that we did multiple times in English class last year, I get that people view it as a waste of time and want to get it done with AI. Even with those kinds of assignments, I’m still thinking when I’m doing them myself, which is not something that you get when you use AI.

I think a lot of the growing dependence on AI comes from a lack of information and education about artificial intelligence. At my school, we have not been given any information regarding AI, other than a few warnings not to use it from teachers. One teacher told us that she would be able to tell if we used it, but people didn’t seem to believe that. The school seems to believe that if they bring it up and talk to us about it, even more people will use it, but I think that if we're going to exist in a world with artificial intelligence, everyone needs to be educated about it. I think that students can’t fully make a choice about how they want to use it until they know more about it.

Not only have we not learned about AI, but many students have also never been told off or faced consequences for using AI, so they just keep using it to cheat. Instruction should be given to both teachers and students about how to identify AI-generated text and why AI is not always reliable in order to make sure that people using it are aware of possible risks.

In the midst of what we’re all reading about students using AI to cheat, I want teachers to know that there are still people like me that want to learn and don’t want to cheat in school. I think that if our teachers could actually talk to us about AI and explain why it’s valuable to do the assignments on your own, we could avoid some of the risks using AI creates. I also want teachers to know that if we could exert more agency over what assignments we were doing, we might all be more interested in what we’re doing and care more about learning.