AI is the Future
Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay
Teens weigh in on how they're using artificial intelligence
I was 14 when I first heard about AI in a school setting. All around my school, the topic of ChatGPT was spreading.
Now at 16, I have only used ChatGPT once: to find essay prompts about a few books for English class. The software asked me to sign up to use it, which I was a little wary about, but I figured if most of my classmates were using it and nobody mentioned anything about a virus, it would be fine. And it was.
Many students across the country are using ChatGPT — much more than I am. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, nearly one in five teens who have heard of ChatGPT say they have used it to help with their schoolwork.
While I haven’t used ChatGPT much, I have had other encounters with AI.
SnapChat AI, which came out in 2023, has been a source of entertainment for me. When it first came out, I was curious about what it was. I have “talked” to Snapchat AI to test it out and ask it questions. I thought it was pretty cool. I asked it for advice with friends, told it stories about my experiences, and went to it as someone to talk to when I was feeling sad and didn’t want to put my feelings on someone else.
It could generate responses to anything I asked within seconds. If I asked it what its favorite color was, it would choose one — and pick the same one every single time. It was amazing and scary all at once.
Though I have personally experienced the benefits of using AI, there have also been disadvantages that come with it. For example, in my English class, we have in-class writing about every two weeks or so, possibly more. My teacher has told us that this is specifically because of the use of AI. The English department does not trust us students to not use AI to write our papers and essays.
The two essays we have to write outside of class throughout the entire 2023-24 school year are graded harder than our in-class papers because we have more time to work on them. For me, in-class writing is a lot harder than the outside-of-class essays. I am a slow worker, so creating a four to five-paragraph essay in an hour is not easy. My life has been negatively impacted by AI in this way.
But maybe that’s just me. I wanted to know how some other people in my generation use AI and how they feel about it. So I talked to four other students in my grade to get their thoughts.
Sean Abello, 16, said that the first time he heard about AI was during his freshman year of high school when a friend told him about ChatGPT.
Abello said he has used AI to find good boba places and that ChatGPT has “made finding sources a lot easier for research papers.” But he is also afraid of the negative effects of AI.
“There has been a big risk in [impersonating people],” Abello said. AI could “risk a lot of jobs and ruin many peoples’ lives because there’s been a lot of [fake images] on the internet.”
Sixteen-year-old Pamela Jones said that the first time she heard about AI was at the beginning of freshman year. She uses it to make study guides for quizzes and tests.
“It helps make studying a bit easier,” Jones said, “and that cuts down a lot of the time that it would usually take to make a study guide or study.”
Jones said whether AI is good or bad depends on how you use it.
“(AI is) a really good tool if you use it the right way,” she said. “But if you abuse it, it could become a weapon and it wouldn’t benefit you as much as it could. So if you use it with good intentions, it should be fine.”
Teddy Bell, 16, said he first heard about AI when it came out on Snapchat and through “social media posts as well, like advertisements for ChatGPT.” He has used AI to generate ideas, write paragraphs, and find information.
“[AI] has definitely made life a lot easier because now I don’t have to research or look up as much,” he said. “I can get an AI to give me a basic understanding of something, and then I can also use it to help me generate ideas for essays and give me main topics.”
Bell likes AI but also feels that it is “kind of scary.”
He said he thinks “it’s going to make people a lot more lazy and a lot less smart, and it’s unfair because it evens out the playing field — like a [dumb] person can be the same as a smart person now.”
Kaley Chin,16, said she first heard about AI in the fifth grade. Since then, Chin has asked AI questions about the world and used it as a source of entertainment.
She also used it for classes — when she has permission — and says it sometimes makes research easier.
“AI is good,” Kaley said. “It may be bad, but like the majority [of it] is good.”
Like my classmates, I see pros and cons to AI I think it can benefit us teenagers by easing our workloads and helping us study and find resources. And it entertains us too. But we don’t know what impact it will have on us or the future.
I am afraid of what it could potentially bring. I don’t think that it is dangerous to our physical health, but I think that it could definitely make people lose their jobs and therefore be dangerous to peoples’ mental health. Whatever the future impacts of AI may be, for teenagers, it is making things a lot easier, and for now, that seems good enough.