AI has been slowly but surely taking over our lives. We may not always notice it, but think – how often do you now call a customer service line and get met with a chatbot instead of a real person? Are you starting to get more and more calls that are generated by a computer algorithm instead of real people?
AI is becoming more popular among today's students. To a teenager, completing assignments is a waste of time compared to having AI do them instead. Students don’t see the impacts of using ChatGPT, since using it once or twice can’t be that harmful, right? An article written on October 6th, 2025 by Newsroom from College Board reports that “the percentage of high school students who report using GenAI tools for schoolwork is growing, [and has increased] from 79% to 84% [from] January to May 2025”.
While AI can be a helpful tool for students from time to time, perhaps to explain errors in their work when a teacher is unavailable to give assistance or to give feedback on their assignments, students are also using it to skip over learning and ultimately harm their educational experience.
Even though some see AI use as an issue that may affect our future, it's already incredibly prevalent in our day-to-day lives, especially in schools worldwide. Teachers are quickly having to learn how to catch AI misuse and trying to find new approaches to combat it, as reliance on AI leads to learning gaps and a lack of confidence in decision-making. This results in a loss of important critical thinking skills that school is supposed to teach students.
I asked Shannon Vaughan, an English teacher at Mira Costa High School, about how using AI in the classroom will affect students later in life. Ms. Vaughan revealed that they “won’t be able to evolve as writers… and will rely on ChatGPT or AI to write things for them.” She also has noticed a trend towards a loss of basic grammar skills, commenting that kids already “don’t know how to capitalize, spell as well, punctuate sentences, and even write complete sentences.” When asked how she, as an English teacher, tackles AI use when seen in her classroom and her students’ work, she explained that “it is difficult to combat, and [she] does [her best] but unfortunately it’s evolving so fast that we [the teachers] cannot keep up with the cheating.”
AI is evolving rapidly in our society, and it undoubtedly has many positive benefits to offer as a reference tool when used correctly, but the potential downfalls need to be understood to avoid abuse of the technology that leads to a decline in skills and intelligence among our students and future workforce.
“New Research: Majority of High School Students Use Generative AI for Schoolwork.” Collegeboard.org, 2025, newsroom.collegeboard.org/new-research-majority-high-school-students-use-generative-ai-schoolwork.