For better or for worse, AI seems to be here to stay. Since late 2022, Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot have quickly begun to beguile their way into seemingly every portion of our lives.
According to Stanford’s 2025 Index Report, in just the past year, AI usage has dramatically risen in popularity, leaving a significant impact on education. New tools make it easier and faster to generate AI content. This new technology has been shown to enable better learning aids, but also rampant plagiarism.
With how adaptive AI can be for a student, it may seem like a logical option to take advantage of it, but a lot more lies under the surface than just a message generator.
AI isn’t perfect, in fact it’s far from it. There are some applications that can greatly benefit from LLM assistance. However, it is just as important to recognize the extreme drawbacks AI has to offer on individual, ethical, and environmental scales.
“Generative AI in schools has a pretty negative impact on our learning,” said senior Levi Montero. “If we keep it out of schools, it just makes everything easier and it makes the learning experience a lot more genuine.”
The only portion of “artificial intelligence” that is true to its name is the “artificial” part. LLMs are trained on pre-existing internet data to create the most realistic response possible, which isn’t always accurate, according to an article by Frontiers. While the generated text of a LLM can seem realistic, that’s all it can do. The generated response can be correct, but a wide variety of opinions, misinformation, and spam is used within its training data, which an AI cannot truly interpret as right or wrong. This can cause a lot of problems if the generated responses given are used without taking a moment to consider its accuracy.
There are some strengths AI has in regards to education specifically. For one, LLMs are able to quickly provide responses. Students can be given nearly instant personalized feedback to any questions. Additionally, AI assistance can streamline the grading process for teachers, allowing them to have more time for lesson plans and personal needs. Large scale sorting is something that LLMs excel at, which has the potential to be helpful in fields that require sorting through large databases, such as archival and medicine.
“I use AI to write assignments for my students. I wrote two assignments for my freshman English class today using AI,” said english teacher Cynthia Comrack. “You can use it for every single thing you do if you know how to use it.”
In order to train LLMs on the scale of something like ChatGPT, an immense amount of data and information is required. Ethically sourcing that much data is expensive, so automated accounts, also known as bots, are used to promptly scrape every possible internet webpage they can find without consent from the authors or artists, which is ultimately known as plagiarism.
Since the dawn of the internet, public art and writing communities have thrived in online spaces, but the threat of AI and bot scraping has created a lot of panic and backlash. The amount of training data required to reach an “acceptable” quality is practically inhuman to manage, let alone compensate artists and writers for. According to the National Library of Medicine, ChatGPT 4, a text-based LLM, has over 1 petabyte of training data, with image generators requiring far more. With how hard it would be to individually compensate and credit each artist, many AI companies and individual hosts simply don’t. Every day, revenue is continued to be made off of selling generation tools to third parties like companies looking to cut costs. For artists, not only are companies using their training data without credit, compensation, or consent, but they are in many cases using that data to replace the same artists with generated images. According to statistics found by Everypixel, 34 million AI generated images created off of human works are made every day while artists and contractors are struggling to find work in the industry.
“It can be cool in the fields of science or research for parsing through data and such, but when it tries to take over human creativity just for capitalism’s sake, I think it’s pretty terrible,” said Montero.
It takes a significant amount of energy to form a coherent AI generated response. To an uninformed user, AI may appear to simply come from their computer. However, all of the behind the scenes computation takes place in gigantic “server farms,” completely dedicated to processing data. These farms require an absurd amount of energy to keep them running, which puts excessive strain on the power grid while increasing carbon dioxide emission.
According to Frontiers, researchers found that the more complex a task given is, the more CO2 is created in the process of converting formats and computation. On the scale AI is used in, this can cause serious and unignorable damage to the environment on a scale nearly incomparable to any modern technology today.
According to MIT News, along with CO2 emissions, many gallons of water are required to cool down the machinery in these facilities, which can disrupt the nearby ecosystem over time and strain city water systems.
The job market is also heavily threatened by AI. Many companies have adopted specialized AI systems to read resumes and applications for them, which are known to be inaccurate at times. Young adults will have to pay close attention to what jobs are being threatened. In the pursuit of cutting costs, huge waves of AI-spurred layoffs are unfortunately becoming more common for large companies, leading to even further economic instability for an already financially struggling generation.
Even if it takes more effort, working to develop skills is an important part of every student’s education. Relying on AI for assignments can severely hinder a student’s ability to do well in high school and beyond. It is important for high schoolers to keep reinforcing and developing their skills without AI, not just as students, but as their own people. In a time of such uncertainty, having the skills you need to navigate the world without relying on AI is a vital thing to have.
