Artificial intelligence is taking over the world, including in high school classrooms. The most popular AI being ChatGPT which was publicly released in 2022, and most recently Google Gemini launched its mobile app in 2024. Even though AI is a tool that can be used for helpful things like personalized learning, over-reliance on AI can negatively impact someone’s personal skills and intelligence.
With the snap of a picture and a short sentence of instruction, any AI platform can complete the task. This especially becomes an issue when the task starts becoming school work. In these new ages, AI is easily accessible which tempts students to give in and AI their homework, especially if it may be late at night, if they are on a time crunch or if they feel the pressure of needing a good grade.
According to Senior Editor on NPR Cory Turner, constant AI usage can become “a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains.”
Senior Fellow at Brookings Rebecca Winthrop also states that “when kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is… they are not thinking for themselves.”
AI is rapidly increasing student’s “cognitive off-loading,” ultimately causing less learning and less retention of information.
This declines their “content knowledge, critical thinking and even creativity” according to the NPR report.
“Students have moved from using AI on hard assignments to even the easy ones which is causing them to lack critical thinking skills,” Junior Payton Wren said. “It is especially bothersome when students in Honors and AP classes are using it to do their work.”
This unhealthy usage of AI is even starting to affect students’ national test scores. To be more specific, Derek Newton from Forbes Magazine explains that “American middle and high school students are not performing well on assessments… Even so, our most recent national test scores… are ‘at historic lows’.”
Students’ learning is a serious matter. It is not something that anyone should take lightly because one’s ability to learn will affect them for the rest of their life. It is safe to say that when someone goes to the doctor, the auto repair, to court or to the airport, you would hope that they actually know what they are doing and did not AI their way through school. So think for yourself, do you want to learn for yourself now or use AI and face possibly serious repercussions later on?
