School is changing. Generative AI allows students to easily offload thinking to chatbots that produce completed worksheets, literature annotations, and, well, whatever else someone could think to ask them for. This transformation has introduced a number of problems in education—and not just the obvious ones.
“These programs have destroyed much of what tied us together as students,” Ashanty Rosario, a 17-year-old who attends a public high school in Queens, New York, wrote in an essay for The Atlanticthis week. “There is little intensity anymore. Relatively few students seem to feel that the work is urgent or that they need to sharpen their own mind.”
Where does this all lead? As Ashanty writes, “If chatbots have made school easier to get through, they are also making school equally as hard to grow out of. The technology is producing a generation of eternal novices, unable to think or perform for themselves.”
(Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.)
AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable.
During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.
These incidents were jarring—not just because of the cheating, but because they made me realize how normalized these shortcuts have become.
In a new episode of the Atlantic podcast Autocracy in America, host Garry Kasparov speaks with the cognitive scientist—and frequent AI critic—Gary Marcus about the possibility that AI could contribute to a rise of techno-fascism in the United States. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts.
— Damon
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