Throughout the entirety of my high school career, I have seen the effect of AI on my classroom environment. Teachers are now taking more and more measures to keep AI out of the classroom, with nearly all my essays being written in class and even in some cases being written on paper and for good reason.

      Many of my peers have been utilizing artificial intelligence to cheat on essay writing, and now with the use of photographic AI, they can cheat on many different types of homework It’s getting harder and harder for our teachers to tell what’s real and what’s not.These measures make it seem like we are going back to prevent progression but do we have to?

     I’m not going to lie, I’ve used AI plenty of times, whether that be to help study or grade my work before I submit it or that be to study and I’m not alone. According to a Campus Theory survey. 86% of students admit to already using AI. But this is not just a classroom issue. The University of Delaware is offering courses on how to use AI in your writing.

     And it’s not just in schools we can already see it all around us. Just recently the news Broadcaster ABC used AI to generate an article on a scientific study about the cosmos. These companies are showing a shift in the public and corporate view of the role that AI plays in the workplace as not something immoral or anti-human but a tool, and like any tool it works to make our lives easier.

      One of the major forms of writing I and many others have been required to learn has been informational writing mechanics. Everyone knows it is the classic idea of finding some sources to conjure up an essay informing someone on a topic, and how AI works, it uses multiple sources to generate a text informing someone on a topic sound at all familiar. This is what generative AI is designed to do and it can do it far better in writing an informative article than you and I. I’ll admit I still see the use in teaching writing in an essay format but I believe our writing efforts are being misplaced.

      It’s undeniable that AI is a new part of modern society and it is advancing faster than we are willing to adjust to. So how do we prepare our students for this inevitable future? I think it’s a lot more effective to show and teach people the value of authentic human opinion and maybe integrate it with the classroom through grammar checks like Grammarly and assisting in the writing process without taking away its authenticity.

     We could show the applications in informational and traditional writing and shift our curriculum to be more geared toward an opinion-based or argumentative style because one of the many things modern AI struggles to recreate is the authenticity of human opinion.

      So where does this take us and to be honest I don’t know, the idea of AI can seem scary or dystopian, and maybe it is, but denying its existence does nobody any good and that is what we have been doing as a collective at our school.

     The future is coming on faster than we ever could have anticipated and it is our job as students and educators to face it head-on or look away in fear.