Is The Rise Of A.I. Affecting Education? By: Audrey Rubach

Recently, Artificial Intelligence has become a global phenomenon, especially in educational establishments. The use of artificial intelligence by students has risen to over 70% in the last year, according to AIPRM. A.I., has provided a gateway to everything in the education system, such as providing students with homework answers, generating images, and helping explain content. Even some teachers use A.I. to create lesson plans, grade work, and even cater work toward students’ individual learning styles. 

A.I. has many positive resources to help students, but with the endless resources, also come the negatives. Kessa Chatterjee, a sophomore at Hillgrove, explained how she believes Artificial Intelligence has both positive and negative impacts at school. “It is both bad and good because it can be cool if you're using it to help you learn but, if you're just using it in place of doing your own work, it is very harmful.” A.I. offers powerful tools that benefit education, but it also raises concerns about student honesty and responsibility.

Academic integrity is something artificial intelligence influences. A.I. can enable cheating, and cause reliance on the program, affecting students’ ability to think for themselves and can diminish critical thinking skills. A representative at sciencedirect.com explained, “In today's rapidly changing educational landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) poses significant challenges to the educational ecosystem's ability to maintain academic integrity.”  Another Hillgrove student, Celena Ramahi described how not following academic integrity can affect all students, “There are some students that are working for what they want, and they graduate with, like... honest A's, and then, like, there's other students that just cheated their way through high school, you know?”

With A.I. use rising quickly, the future of education may look different. A student at Hillgrove, Kate Merchant, said this about how she sees the future. “I think teachers are gonna start realizing that everyone's using AI and use it themselves. And then were not gonna be learning, and they're not gonna be teaching as well.” When students rely on the use of A.I, they may start to lose the development of life skills, and teachers may stop the teaching or necessary lessons for the development of these skills.

Students and teachers are offered both possibilities and opportunities by artificial intelligence, as well as potential risks and downsides, and the integration of A.I. into school will continue to affect how education evolves.