Sunday night is bleeding into Monday morning, and you’re still not done. The light from your computer bathes the room in a sickly glow. You glance at the time. It’s an impossible task. A relatable predicament leads some to try a novel solution: artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to pop up everywhere, with platforms like ChatGPT and Google Gemini being some of the most commonly used. AI use in school is prevalent, with 73.7% of students reporting having an opportunity to use AI as provided by their teacher, according to 193 respondents who filled out a survey by The Cypress sent on student Canvas pages on Tuesday, Oct. 28.
Google Gemini and Notebook LM
In recent weeks, teachers have been told that AI tools like Gemini and Notebook LM will be available to students as part of their Google Suite. Dean of Student Support Brian Poon confirmed that during a professional development day on Tuesday, Nov. 4, another announcement stated that the AI tools were ready to be posted for students to access. The messaging suggested that this move would happen in the coming weeks. While there had been some previous communications to teachers about this move, many teachers were surprised at how quickly the decision to release the tools had been made.
This announcement sparked debate among teachers, with social studies teacher Sam Dickerman being one of the many outspoken voices. Dickerman leads protests outside the school every Thursday as part of his conviction that the school should ban phones. He said he feels the same way about AI.
“Why [are we] turning this on? Who’s making the decision? Who’s asking for it to be turned on? We have no idea. And they never asked the teachers. They never came to us and said, ‘Should we turn this on?’ No discussion at all. The AI training we’ve been doing this year has all been, ‘How are we going to use AI?’ Not, ‘Should we use AI?’ This is the giant flaw in their thinking,” Dickerman said.
Following the professional development day, Dickerman wrote an email to all teachers comparing AI to “the fox in the hen house,” in which he said that bringing AI into the classroom would be reckless and harmful.
“To me, AI is the fox and our school is the hen house,” Dickerman said. “Are there foxes in the woods out there? Sure, but that’s why we build hen houses: to protect those within. Now some unknown person or group has unilaterally decided to bring the fox inside […] We should do everything we can to prevent that from happening here.”
English teacher Peter Sedlak agreed that teachers should be given the opportunity to provide insight regarding student use of AI. He said that adding AI tools to students’ Google Suites will make teachers’ jobs harder.
“I think it puts a lot more pressure on [teachers] to then spend time assessing the validity and integrity of an assignment. That’s not me, then, teaching or actually giving honest feedback on learning; it’s spent deliberating authenticity,” Sedlak said.
Junior Gabriel Forman said that outlining the role AI should play in schools is still in progress and is a necessary pursuit.
“I think that at the current moment of transition between non-AI use and AI use, there’s sort of a gray area where we’re trying to find how AI fits in,” Forman said. “But I think, just like computer technology versus handwriting, it’s eventually going to be integrated into positive areas. We need to find those boundaries at the moment.”
Varied opinions
Students and teachers have many different opinions on AI use, some citing its environmental impact and the threat it poses to art and media as reasons to stay away from it altogether. Others are interested in the prospects of using it as a powerful tool.
School Within A School English teacher Ben Berman said that AI has different uses in an educational setting than it does for tasks outside of school.
“In a lot of the world, AI is really about efficiency and productivity, but we don’t want that in school. We want messiness. We want learning. We want students to grapple and struggle so that they know how to do it. And we want to be able to measure what they’re understanding,” Berman said. “It’s a unique paradigm in schools about how we have to deal with AI.”
Sophomore Lara Spitz Sousa said that AI has no place in school and that its use should not be encouraged by teachers, as it reduces the amount of learning that happens in classrooms.
“We are in an academic space to learn how to do many things,” Spitz Sousa said. “We’re here to accrue knowledge. We’re here to build skills. Those skills include doing our own research. They include doing our own writing and putting together our own ideas, not just patchwork information from all the corners of the internet that an AI is going to spit out at you.”
Sedlak said that he worries AI will take away the interpersonal value school has to offer.
“I had a thought the other week when I had asked them to [use AI for an assignment], and I heard some kids, one of my students, say that they thought that they enjoyed talking to the bot more than their classmates, which I thought might be a sad outcome of that kind of practice,” Sedlak said. “They’d rather just have their own little experience and not share out, which seems to ruin the communal aspect of school.”
However, interaction with AI chatbots could be used to supplement learning for students who may not have the means to hire a tutor. Berman is a proponent of this approach; he said that AI chatbots could help to create a more equitable playing field in education.
“I think about tutoring. One hundred dollars an hour for a subject. But you can get Khanmigo, which is a very good AI tutor, for $4 a month,” Berman said. “Obviously, a human tutor, you can’t replace that. It’s relational, they get to know you, but the guardrails in a program like Khanmigo are really in place [so] that it won’t do any work for you.”
However, pushing students toward AI tools only makes these students more likely to use AI for “cognitive offload” and less likely to succeed in school, according to Dickerman.
“The future of humanity may be a world of thinkers and non-thinkers […] And if you take kids from backgrounds where they don’t have the same supports at home as the rich kids and you’re just like ‘Use AI,’ you’re just consigning them to the bottom,” Dickerman said. “You’re just not closing any kind of equity gap. You’re just giving up on them.”
But junior Liam Loughnane said that AI can be a powerful tool if used correctly.
“I think [AI] gets a bad rep. I also think that some people use it too much,” Loughnane said. “But I think it’s a good tool to know how to use since it’s everywhere now.”
Many believe that students should be taught how to use AI tools in school so that they will have marketable skills that they can use as part of the workforce. Yet, according to social studies teacher Stephen Eesley, this type of structured learning around AI might not be necessary.
“I’ve heard that argument made a lot. It was tempting at first to me because I do want my students to be competitive in the workforce,” Eesley said. “On the other hand, I’m not the most technologically interested person. I’ve learned how to use Gemini and AI […] What I’m really worried about is sending people out into the workforce so they can think for themselves and who know how to find the tough answers.”
Teacher response
In the survey, students reported that teachers gave numerous opportunities to use AI in class. These opportunities range from talking to a chatbot in World Language classes to using AI platforms to do research and create study guides.
One way to curb AI use is to require more assignments to be completed on paper, an approach Sedlak said has been used by many teachers in the English department in particular.
“All the writing assignments have been in-class essay assignments or timed essay assignments in class,” Sedlak said. “So my seniors did three or four in-class essays in quarter one, and I would say, ‘You’ve got 57 minutes. Start,’ and I know a lot of other English teachers are doing the same thing.”
Eesley said that he keeps his classroom a mostly technology-free environment, only using computers if it is absolutely necessary. He said that this policy was put into place to curb plagiarism on assignments and promote a closer community.
“I take students’ phones all the time, and I just stack them on my lectern and I try not to make them feel like they’re bad for having them out, but I also want them to talk to each other,” Eesley said. “That’s it. Just normal face-to-face connections instead of staring at your phone before everyone comes in.”
Systemic issues with the education system
Whether AI will prove a valuable tool or a cheating device, Sedlak said that he has found that most interactions with students surrounding AI have been addressing unsanctioned use.
“I can’t remember how many kids I caught in the last two years, maybe a dozen or maybe more than a dozen,” Sedlak said. “And that’s caught. And that’s not suspected. At the end of the last year, I suspected nearly every student had used it on their paper. I bet if you asked them quietly, they probably would say that they did at some point, and they just got away with it.”
Spitz Sousa said that the issue of dishonest AI use stems from problems with the education system as a whole.
“If you’re being swamped with all this work, because school really does tend to put a lot of pressure and a lot of stress on students to keep up with everything, AI [can] help you alleviate some of that stress,” Spitz Sousa said. “It is a great tool in that way and it’s not, therefore, a solution to the fundamental problem of the way that we teach in this country and in the wide world.”
Forman agreed that using AI to do work that students could do on their own is largely due to the competitive environment created at school.
“It’s just a little sad when you see people resorting to it because it’s almost like they’re discounting their own intelligence in order to achieve what they see as superior academic success,” Forman said.
Sophomore Michael Xia said that students should use resources that will allow them to improve their own skills, instead of using AI to do their work for them.
“We have teacher collab time, we have X-block to go look for help. I don’t think you should rely on an AI to do your work,” Xia said. “Maybe as a last resort, but you’ve got so many other options. And if you like using AI to do your work, then why are you taking the class?”
Berman said that in order for AI to be used in productive ways, students must want to learn and be intrinsically motivated to grow as students, instead of being motivated by external accomplishments.
“My hope is that we can do the right preventions so that people could trust an opportunity like [AI] and it doesn’t get ruined,” Berman said, “And that it encourages us to think about how we rearticulate our values and redefine our values to narrow the gap between how teachers and students are thinking about the meaningfulness of the work, so that students may not want to cheat. They really value the importance of their own work.”
