Every high school student understands the agony of staring at an unintelligible English essay prompt, wishing they were doing anything other than stressing out about homework. In the 1980s, students might have called their friends on a landline to brainstorm; in the 2000s, students might have clicked through endless Google links in search of a relevant web page; and in 2025, students might pose the question to one of many AI websites to receive a detailed response in seconds.
The narrative around today’s students and AI goes something like this: lazy students use AI to generate entire English essays, complete social studies presentations, and solve math problems without even bothering to read the questions. This narrative, however, is largely untrue. While I don’t deny that students do use AI to quickly find specific answers, in my experience, students primarily use AI as a tool to generate practice problems, rephrase tricky questions, and organize research. In other words, we don’t rely on AI to solve problems, but instead use it to help us solve problems ourselves.
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To deal with students who do use AI to complete their homework, teachers in the “early days of AI” (i.e. 2023) used automated plagiarism detection software. Over time, many teachers have turned away from that kind of software because it’s just not that reliable. It tends to flag quotations and eloquent writing as “AI generated” even when it’s not. Instead, teachers today rely on tracking editing history (if an entire paper is copy and pasted in a Google doc – that’s a sign that AI might have helped out). Some teachers require hand-written assignments to make sure students have completed their own work. Although these methods aren’t perfect — after all, a student could use AI to generate their homework, then manually copy the result from the screen — they make it more cumbersome and time-consuming for students to rely on AI.
In general, today’s students struggle to use this new technology to ensure that they remain competitive with their peers and on top of never-ending schoolwork while also learning core concepts. Although AI can make learning more efficient, students reluctantly recognize that spending time with a problem and thinking deeply has no real substitute.
One overarching concern for teachers and parents is how AI will impact the creativity and work ethic of current and future generations. With advanced tools that revise entire essays, generate artwork, and form complex ideas for research, there seems to be little need for creativity. In my opinion, this unknown potential of AI isn’t as dangerous for students as many might believe.
AI only has the power to generate ideas and answers based on pre-existing data: texts already published, paintings already created, research papers already written. So, you could argue that it can’t create something truly unique. We all want to imagine, to invent, to be different. While high schoolers might not always be motivated to finish their homework, AI will never replace the instinct to simply create.
So as I sit in front of my laptop, day after day, struggling to craft sentences for this article, I wonder one thing: how much quicker I would’ve finished this had I just asked ChatGPT?
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the AI Detector certified that this piece was human written, with just an 11% chance it was created by Chat GPT.)
Siri Iagnemma is a junior at Belmont High School, and writes about Gen Z for The Belmont Voice.