When AI Begins to Do the Thinking: New Survey Shows the Cost for Students

A new nationally representative survey by Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute reports that 70% of teens aged 13-17 use AI for schoolwork. Among those teens, 63% said they use it to get answers rather than working their own way toward them. The technology has become an everyday part of education before students, teachers, or parents have agreed on what it should and should not do.

The picture is not simply one of misuse. Many teens hold a divided view: 38% said having AI available leads them to generate fewer of their own ideas, and about the same number said they feel they are missing out on learning when they use it to finish assignments. The same student who takes a chatbot's paragraph one day may use AI only for feedback the next.

Yvette Renteria, a former teacher and principal now at Common Sense Media, warns that even uses that seem harmless can carry a cost. Writing an essay, she notes, builds the capacity to understand different perspectives, to make an argument, and to stay in the discomfort of an unsettled question long enough to think. A chatbot can simulate disagreement, but it cannot reproduce the human work of disagreeing with another person.

Bans alone have proved insufficient. Nearly half of the teens who use AI reported having a tool blocked at school, and most simply switched to a personal device. Meanwhile 73% of teens said they have never talked to a teacher about what AI is and how it works. The survey suggests conversations, at school and at home, matter more than prohibitions.

• 55% of teens named working well with other people as a skill most important for their future.
• 50% chose fact-checking and critical thinking.
• Only 21% chose knowing how to use AI tools effectively.

The finding points to a task for adults: strengthening the human abilities that AI can too easily allow children to skip, rather than teaching them to be better at using AI. This reporting is drawn from Common Sense Media, https://www.commonsensemedia.org/articles/ai-in-education.