.jpg "The Tweens Down Under: Life Without Social Media in Australia")
If you try to get AI to do all your work, it’s definitely detrimental, because then you lose your skills to write and read. It can make students more lazy. But that’s your loss, if you’re using it to cheat on your work.
I feel like nowadays AI gets portrayed in a very bad light, like it’s taking away everyone’s job and doing peoples’ work for them. But I feel like people aren’t realizing that the AI is what you train it on. We’re the ones creating technology, right? There are so many ways that we could solve problems with AI, as long as you use it for the right things. If you want to do good in this world, then you should be able to use a new technology in a good way that would benefit everyone.
Where I live in Colorado, we have a lot of wildlife vehicle collisions. So a couple years ago, I decided to try making a tool to help solve the problem. I brought the idea to my computer science teacher and some other students, and I ended up building a device that could detect deer, that you can put on your car. In our case, AI was really useful, because all we had to do was feed data into the model: I ran hundreds of thermal video frames through a computer vision model to recognize deer and other large wildlife, which trained our device to do real-time detection on the road without us having to manually analyze hours of footage. That’s the power of AI. — Siddhi Singh, 17, Highlands Ranch, Colorado
AI Is Bad for the Environment—and Turning Us Into Robots
I first heard about AI in middle school, when Snapchat added it to the chat messages feature. At first, I was like, wow, cool, this can probably make my life a whole lot easier. I started to use it for simple questions to help with my homework.
Now, I don’t use it at all. It’s very looked down upon by teachers and students at my school. If you get caught using AI or ChatGPT, you get kicked out of school.
I do feel like AI is infiltrating everything. My older sister uses ChatGPT, but I want her to stop using it, because it does so much harm to the environment. My younger sister uses AI to reply to text messages. That’s just a little glimpse as to what the future could look like, and it’s kind of scary, because that’s not normal.
Social media has already taken over peoples’ personalities, and AI speeds up that process. If you ask AI how to respond to a message, and it gives you an automated response, that’s going to impact the way you think you should respond to people. Eventually, when you use the advice of a robot, you become a robot. — Mahawa Kaba, 15, the Bronx, New York
Kids Are Going to Use AI, So Teach Them How
I go to an AI-themed high school, where AI is integrated into our classes, like through data science and programming. The teachers actually taught us how to use it first, and then let us use it. The biggest thing is to ask ourselves: Why am I using AI right now? Am I using it to make my work better? Am I using it because I’m just too lazy to do it?
Basically, you’re supposed to use AI to cut down on monotonous tasks that you don’t need to be doing yourself. From there, you bring back that human innovation and originality.
My first true experience with AI was in my AP human geography class, when we were looking at one of the blizzards that happened in Atlanta in the 2000s. We were looking at the data of how people were able to get home, so it was a lot of big data—thousands and thousands of numbers. So we used an AI program to split and compartmentalize those numbers, and then we were able to use our critical thinking to understand what the best resources are, and if something like that were to happen again, how governments should react.
