Almost immediately after ChatGPT was first published in late 2022, alarm bells have been ringing across the education world about its negative impact on learning. That year, The Atlantic published articles with titles like “The College Essay Idied” And “The end of English in high school.” Predictions were that the deployment of AI worldwide would lead to an exponential increase in cheating in school and that student essays would cease to be original.
“I mean, since day one, the conversation in education has been really focused on cheating. And AI is still mostly seen as this thing that kids use to cheat. So, you know, let’s not be naive. A lot of kids use AI to cheat,” says Leon Furze, an educational consultant and author of Practical AI strategies: interacting with Generative AI in education. But he adds, “We kind of have to go beyond that, I think, and meet students where they are with technology.” »
Cut to 2025 and that’s what’s happening at many LA summits private schoolswhere panic was replaced by pragmatism.
Yes, there are safeguards. Many schools are creating AI-free zones for testing, essay writing, and other creative endeavors. “A lot more work, including writing assignments, is now done exclusively in class,” says showrunner and writer Anthony Sparks (Bel Air, Queen of sugar), who has a child at the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School.
The same applies to Sierra Canyon School in Los Angeles (where recent graduates include Bronny and Bryce James). Noah B. Salomon, chair of the school’s English department, says, “For most assignments, to preserve training in independent critical thinking, we create an environment in which students cannot use AI (such as) in-class writing, participation, and graded discussions.” »
But as generative AI continues to infiltrate almost every facet of society, administrators and teachers are increasingly looking for creative ways to interact with the technology with an eye toward preparing students for the real world.
Last July, the Buckley School (which Laura Dern, Bret Easton Ellis and Paris Hilton attended) held a week-long school Intensive AI Summer Camp on campus ($1,500 for the week), where school-aged students could learn everything from “AI + art” to “leveraging machine learning to help first responders allocate resources in crisis situations.”
At Windward School (which Josh Groban and Zoe Kazan attended), a specialized and technical education team strives to help educators deepen their understanding of ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and MagicSchool AI (an education-focused AI platform).
And at Sierra Canyon School, the administration has partnered with AI education platform edYOU, which offers students custom chatbot avatars it can help them with everything from tutoring to keeping up with their classes.
Salomon of Sierra Canyon details other ways the school is engaging students in the use of AI. “We asked teachers to experiment, find ways to harness the power of AI in their teaching, and encourage students to use AI in a way that is ethical and does not interfere with their learning or curiosity. For example, students in a literature course might be asked to have a conversation with ChatGPT about a particular chapter of a novel, but they would have to use specific quotes from the novel to challenge ChatGPT’s initial reading. Students might be encouraged to use AI to create quizzes on material or to have AI review an essay to provide another source of feedback on structure.
And for every student who wants to use AI as a crutch or shortcut, there are others who want to use it responsibly, even sparingly. “A 13-year-old student asked me, “Even if my school teaches us to use AI, should we do it?” “, says Furze. “And she was really concerned that if she started using AI at 13, she wouldn’t be able to use her own brain at 18. There are some very young students who are really concerned about that. On the other hand, I also see that there’s a lot of pressure from students to use AI because they think they’ll be outmatched. There’s a lot of perception that, ‘If I don’t use the AI, the student next to me will I have to use the AI and they will do better. So I have to use it to stay competitive.
Adds Stacie Muñoz, director of educational innovation and technology services at Oakwood School (whose alumni include Chris Pine and Lily-Rose Depp), “I think there’s an assumption that all kids use AI all the time and I will say I’ve talked to a lot of kids who don’t fall into that camp and are really hesitant about AI and look down on others for using it. You know, these kids are really smart now.”
Nonetheless, Oakwood School is also requiring more writing to be done in the classroom and is evaluating various forms of technology that can be leveraged to limit and prevent the use of AI, including so-called browser locking on computers. “Kids can still write, but they can’t access other things on their computer,” Muñoz says. She adds that “we use things like the Google Docs version history checker to kind of monitor that kids are staying in their documents to get work done… because we find that it’s so easy to default to AI.” » But Oakwood does not currently use AI checkers to assess whether students are using technology to complete their assignments. “We actually did professional development for teachers at a recent meeting where we took an email saying I was using AI to help me write and we put it through three different AI reviewers and they all gave different answers. One said no AI was used, the other said about 50 percent. They all said different things. So we’re using that as an example for our teachers to say, ‘We don’t “We can’t really trust AI against AI.”
“And if anything,” she continues, “it will only reinforce distrust in our students. That’s not a direction we choose to go in because there’s really no evidence that it works. And if anything, it will only reinforce distrust.”
School leaders and students also face a host of other concerns about AI, from whether AI will increase or decrease career prospects in certain fields (like graphic design or video game design) to the environmental impact of the technology, which is significantly increasing energy consumption across the world. At a school like Oakwood, sustainability is really important to our students and our community,” says Muñoz. “They are thinking about the long-term effects of the continued use of AI on our planet. »
For parents and tech entrepreneurs Adam Ayers and Victoria de la Fuente, who live in Los Angeles and have two young boys, the advent of generative AI is impacting their schooling decision-making. The couple (who founded the social platform Doomscrollr) currently send their eldest son to a Montessori school “because they’re really focused on independence, on self-learning and teachable life skills,” says de la Fuente, who is also the founder of Zillion Trillion, an education-focused Substack newsletter and podcast. More than ever, the couple wants to avoid schools that emphasize memorization, while favoring schools that rely on process-based learning. “From what I’ve seen in the schools I’ve visited, they’re still pushing a lot on the memorization path. It’s like the AI era where they can just have vast access to all this information. It doesn’t seem relevant,” de la Fuente says.
This is something that resonates with Muñoz: “For us, it’s about finding a balance between when we can insert AI appropriately without losing that human element. That’s really pushed us to work with teachers on how we can re-evaluate the way we teach and maybe change some of our assessments a little bit to focus more on the human elements that AI can’t replicate. How can we really encourage being human? That’s a big part of our conversation.”