Artificial Intelligence (AI) usage has become more popular and easier to access in schools. Twenty-six percent of teens who say they use ChatGPT for their schoolwork, according to Pew Research Center.  Some teachers and students say AI is a tool to help and improve the education system, while other teachers and students say using AI is harmful and not impactful. 

English and Basic Skills Teacher Tina Morton shares some ways she responsibly uses AI in school, such as checking for errors in an essay so she can then use her rubric to manually grade the assignment.

“You have to be able to write on your own before you can use AI as a tool to help you strengthen your writing,” Morton said. “I often use AI. A lot of times I use it to help with essay grading, not necessarily the scoring. I grade and score all of my student’s essays, but I want to make sure that they have a lot of feedback and AI is a great tool to use when getting feedback over things like MLA formatting and grammar usage.”

Morton says while teaching her study hall, using teaching styles like showing informational YouTube videos are not always the most effective way to get a point across. Instead, she will sometimes use AI to give an example problem for certain subjects she doesn’t specialize in, such as creating math problems or a walk through of a chemistry problem.

“I also see AI as a great tool for helping with research,” Morton said. “It doesn’t always pull the best sites to use, but instead of a student having to go and have this unlimited, vast internet to try to find sources, you could use AI to help find some sources and limit them to a topic. You would still need to be able to check those sources whether or not they are credible, biased, all of the things that you would normally do for a source and save yourself time searching everywhere.”

Morton says she thinks AI could end up being a tool like a calculator. She says she can remember being in school when people were very worried about students not being able to do math anymore because of a calculator, but now that we have phones almost every student carries a calculator everywhere they go. 

“I think we have to be careful when using AI and moderate its use,” Morton said. “If I use it to think for me and write for me, then all of a sudden we are now going to have a society where we don’t have people who can think critically about what it is they see in the world. They won’t be able to voice their opinions in ways that make them sound intelligent and worth listening to. I also think time is important, and I want to be as efficient as possible so I’m going to use this as a tool to help save me time, yet making sure my voice is protected and my writing is my writing,” 

Junior Ella Kennedy sets a strong example for using AI responsibly in the classroom, showing that AI can enhance learning when used thoughtfully.

“I think that if you’re using AI to help you understand certain topics in school, and you know how you got the answer that you were looking for, AI can help support and improve student learning,” Kennedy said. “I have previously used AI to help me find songs to perform for theater class.”

Kennedy says there are many things AI can be used for that are good, such as helping you brainstorm ideas for an assignment or quickly looking up a fact. On the other hand, Kennedy says there are situations where students are not sensibly using AI. According to KTVZ, 66% of students are taking advantage of AI for writing-based Language Arts classes.

“I think oftentimes students use AI to cheat or get answers or something, and then they don’t understand how to actually complete the given assignment,” Kennedy said. “If they are using an AI tool for history or english class and having it write an entire paper for you, then I don’t think AI is suitable in that situation.”

Kennedy says she would consider using AI for assignments as cheating if it isn’t mainly your own words. She says using AI tools as a base for your assignment could potentially be acceptable, but your writing should be mainly your own words and thoughts.

“If I am using AI, I will read what it gives me and then I change it into my own words and add more of my own thoughts,” she says. “I usually just have it give me ideas so I can have a basis of where to start.”

English Teacher Suzanne Ponder says that although she occasionally uses AI tools for teaching purposes, they will never be a substitute for her own thinking and teaching. According to Pew Research Center, 25% of public K-12 teachers say using AI tools in school does more harm than good.

“I think AI is the next best thing, and I think if it’s used responsibly, it’s okay. The problem is, we’re humans and we don’t always make the right choices, so I think if we’re going to use it, we need to be trained on it,” Ponder says.

Ponder says it is frightening how advanced AI has gotten. AI is beginning to put words into people’s mouths. For example, Ponder says she could be teaching a class and a student could record her and apply AI to the recording to change what she had said. She says it can also be confusing because when AI is incorporated into the news with social media, it can be very difficult to identify what is real and what is fake.

“I don’t think students are using AI properly,” Ponder says. “I think they are using it as a replacement for learning and using their own thoughts. I just hope we keep making the original thoughts from our brains and stop depending so much upon the computer to do it for us.”

Ponder says there are certain things about AI that she appreciates. She thinks it is interesting how students are able to look up things really quickly by using AI, and how they can even create images with certain AI tools.

“There are some really neat applications to it,” Ponder says. “I wish and hope we keep making the original thought from our brains and stop depending so much upon the computer to do it for us, because that’s the real scary part.”

Ponder says she does not think AI will help to improve the education system. She says it is immoral for a teacher to use AI for grading instead of doing it themselves, because they will never get to really read what a student has written or has to say. 

“I don’t think it’s right.  Just like I’m saying to a student, it’s not ethical for you to have AI write your paper. I think it’s unethical for a teacher not to read that paper and really use their own brain to give feedback,” she says. “It’s human nature, we want to take the easy way out.”

Ponder says she will be retiring from New Albany High School soon, and she hopes the rest of her time at NAHS is not overshadowed by the use of AI. She says she enjoys her students’ abilities to focus on their own thoughts. 

Freshman Emery Petry stands firmly on the side of human learning rather than relying on it for her assignments in school.

“I have never used AI for school purposes. It prevents students from thinking and learning for themselves. I would consider using AI in school as cheating because it’s no different from looking up the answers on google,” Petry says.

Petry says she does believe that there are ways AI can help students. It can help suitably explain difficult topics to students who may need a further in-depth explanation. She says some students are taking advantage of this resource and using it to cheat, so any use of it should be prohibited in school.

“I do agree that AI can be helpful for students, but I’ve only seen it be used for cheating and laziness rather than for good, which is why I don’t use it or like it,” Petry says.

Petry says she would never use AI for educational purposes because it enables students to think for themselves. She also says it could potentially restrain students from learning and growing if they are only using AI and computers for finding answers to assignments. AI causes students to cognitively offload, which experts warn threatens their independent reasoning, motivation, critical thinking, and decision making, according to CBS.

“AI can quicken research and condense all of the extra information you get when you read articles, but that’s the only plus for me,” Petry says. “But when using AI, you don’t need to think at all which might slow down your thinking skills in the long run.”

Petry says it’s hard to understand why we suddenly seem to need AI, when we’ve managed to successfully not have it in our daily lives for so long. 

The usage of AI tools in schools is becoming more common and advanced. Students and teachers may have to adapt to this technology being incorporated into our daily lives. 

As a corporation, teachers and administrators are looking at how to monitor AI as it relates to the academic integrity policy.