With more than 56% of Americans using artificial intelligence (AI) more than a few times a week, Urban has debated how AI should be used in students’ education.
Camelia Perez, director of educational technology and innovation, conducted a survey which found that 76.7% of the 257 students surveyed use AI in their classes for research or summarization. AI can be a useful tool for students to find sources and edit essays for grammar and spelling. However, as AI usage increases globally, questions arise about AI’s impact on students’ learning, their environments and the world. Meanwhile, students grapple with how much they should depend on AI in their classes given the possible repercussions.
“AI is a tool like any other,” Perez said. “There could very well be places where AI makes sense to bring into the classroom — maybe brainstorming, or to help figure out: With humans and AI, can we join together to create something new?”
To investigate this further, Perez organized student- and teacher-led groups to discuss AI’s role at Urban. “In DIG, the Digital Innovators Group, we are talking a lot about AI and continuing to find ways to support it in the classroom and get student voices involved,” Perez said.
While some students see AI as a useful tool, others view it with skepticism. “Assignments are there to help us improve aspects of our work, which we’ll never achieve if we rely on AI as a crutch for everything,” Ella Braverman ’27 said.
AI usage continues to rise. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco conducted a survey and found that nearly one in four respondents had used AI the week before they were surveyed. Perez’s survey found that 67 students use AI at least once a week.
AI’s impacts also extend beyond Urban’s walls. A Washington Post report found that to generate a 100-word response, AI models utilize more than one bottle’s worth of water to stop their servers from overheating and crashing. “I don’t understand how anybody could know about that and still choose to use AI regularly,” Vaani Chandra ’25 said. “Anything [AI] can do a human can almost always do. … If I want a drawing, I’ll just draw it. If I want an essay, I’ll just write it.”
Although some students oppose AI usage, certain classes require it for assignments. “Sometimes teachers will direct us to use ChatGPT and I want to scream — we’re wasting gallons of someone else’s water to generate a prompt for a low-stakes high school English assignment?” Braverman said.
“If you’re going to use AI, at least use it responsibly. Don’t use it to just look up random questions that you have. … Use it sparingly and when you think it is absolutely necessary,” Chandra said.
Some people think students can start utilizing AI to prepare for life outside school. “AI is the future, and there’s no stopping it,” a fourth-year undergraduate student at University of Illinois Chicago said in a 2024 report. “It is better to invest resources into how to ethically use AI than to try to ban or restrict its use. We teach students about plagiarism. Teaching students about the ethical use of AI should be no different.”
In Perez’s survey, 125 students said they want Urban to teach students how to use AI tools responsibly and ethically. Still, some students challenge the belief that AI should be the norm in jobs and educational spaces. “Preparing us to exploit the resources of our planet just because our future job might implement it doesn’t [make sense],” Braverman said.
As AI becomes more adaptable and human-like, students are questioning their reliance on technology. “I don’t like how AI is being used specifically to encroach on creative spaces and take the place of human creativity,” Chandra said.
According to a Loyola Marymount University magazine article, AI is being trained to analyze photos throughout the internet, which often includes artists’ work. An AI user can then request an image by typing in a prompt with required specifications, and AI will produce it accordingly. This leads to some artists having difficulty selling their products because users can produce similar work by typing a few words.
Some students criticize image-generating chatbots for enabling laziness. “Why should I care about something that you couldn’t care enough about to do [without AI] and that you clearly thought was below you in some aspect?” Chandra said. “And why should I put the same value [onto it] when you put no effort into it and instead … stole from other artists’ hard work to create it?”