Use AI or Fall Behind? A Teen's Perspective

Why Listen to This Episode 

Students aren’t just using AI to cheat. They are feeling growing pressure to use it just to keep up. Listen to a student explain the tensions and how we can help.

AI use in school is accelerating, but frank conversations among students, parents, and teachers aren’t keeping pace. This 7-minute chat with my 14-year-old reveals why pressure to use AI deserves more attention than the cheating headlines.

You’ll hear:

• How “perfect” AI essays raise the grading curve and the stress

• Why “follow the rules” is impossible when AI is everywhere

• Where AI genuinely helps learning and should be encouraged

• What parents and teachers can do this year instead of banning tools

I’m super proud of Dakota for sharing her perspective.

 Your turn: What AI pressure stories are you hearing from your kids or students? Drop a comment or message me. Let’s keep the conversation going. Transcript below.

Lightly Edited Transcript

Whit

Hi everyone. Welcome to Navigating AI Transitions with Whit. Today we're gonna try something new. I'm doing an audio post and have invited my daughter, Dakota, to join the show. She's 14 years old and is about to enter high school as a freshman next year. We were going to soccer practice the other day and having a conversation about when and how it's okay to use AI, and Dakota said something that caught my attention.

She said:

Almost everyone is cheating with AI. Kids are addicted and use it on every possible assignment. They know it's plagiarism, but they don't care. They just try to not get caught.

Dakota, can you share a little bit more with the listeners about your experience with AI in school last year and help them understand what's going on?

Dakota

Yeah, the part where I was talking about them being addicted, you can definitely tell the more kids use it, the more they need to use it because they feel like if they don't use it, then they have nothing. They don't have any ideas. They're not trying to come up with anything on their own, and they have this easy resource to do it for them. And the more that kids do it, the more that they need it to do their schoolwork. And you can tell.

Whit

So given that, what's the biggest challenge you and your classmates are facing with AI as it starts to become more in the workflows you're using in school or even just more widely available?

Dakota

I would say the balance between using it the correct way of getting your wheels turning in your brain, getting you started on a project and the difference between that and just using it for the whole entire assignment and not doing any work on your own.

That's definitely a hard balance to find and I think a lot of kids in my school haven't figured that out yet, and they're just using it for all their assignments.

Whit

I think it's interesting that you said using it the correct way. Can you help the listeners understand how you think about that? How are the schools explaining what the “correct way” is to the kids? How's that discussion happening right now?

Dakota

In my schools right now, they're saying no AI period, end of story. Which isn't the correct way to go about this because AI is everywhere. Any simple Google search that you do comes up with an AI overview before you even see the links, it's impossible to avoid.

And so the question is not AI or no AI. It's how do you use AI the right way and how do you use it to help you get started and help you learn better and not just to do everything for you?

Whit

As more of your classmates are using AI and pretty heavily on some of these assignments, what are you finding happens if you don't use AI to do your assignments? Or what are you feeling when you don't use AI?

Dakota

When I don't use AI, and I know that from my friend's point of view this is very similar, is people feel pressured to use it because no one's work holds up to the standard that AI has. If kids turn in assignments with AI, it's almost a perfect essay or a math equation or anything, an art project.

It's perfect. And you can't do that same project remotely the same without AI. And so people who aren't using AI feel like they have to use it in order to keep up. And the curve on grading is different because all of a sudden there's this super high standard of these perfect assignments that are turned in, and the kids that don't use it have no chance.

Whit

That's really interesting and I wanna come back to that as we talk about next year and what students and teachers and parents can do to help students. But first, can you help the audience understand some of the ways you did use AI this year and what you found most helpful and where you think you found that right balance between using it the correct way?

Dakota

Yeah, the most helpful class that I found in was actually math because math is a hard class to get individual attention in because there are so many kids and they all have different questions and different needs, and there's only one teacher. And so I would use AI to help it explain the problem to me if I didn't understand it.

And I would ask it for a step by step of how to solve the equation. And then I would ask it for an example. And then I would try and solve the example equation. If I got it, then I was good. And if I didn't, then I could be like, Hey, I didn't quite understand this. Can you help me? And it would help me understand the topic.

I also used it in a couple of my projects. I had a project in social studies where we had to create a small business and I had to create a menu and a budget and where I was gonna put my business, all of the above. And I used AI to help create a visual of what my business might look like so that I could provide a little extra for the teacher without spending hours, extra hours doing something that wasn't required on the assignment. I could use AI to help my assignment just get a little bit extra, and the teachers really enjoyed it.

Whit

That's great. You mentioned how quickly the use of AI is increasing and how that's driving pressure on other students, even if they don't want to use AI to keep up. It feels like as we head into the next school year that things are accelerating, and this is a pretty critical year for students and parents and teachers to talk about and start to get this right, or we could end up in a pretty tough spot. When you think about next year, how can teachers and parents help make this better for you and your classmates in navigating these tensions in this transition?

Dakota

I would say it's not a factor of AI or no AI. AI is everywhere. You can't avoid it. And so it's how do you teach your kids and your students to navigate it the right way and to use it without cheating or plagiarizing, but just to help them get a start or get some creativity in their brains.

I think that's the main thing that teachers and parents are gonna have to learn is you can't say no AI. You have to teach them how to use it the right way.

Whit

So it's not about setting rules and having kids follow the rules, 'cause they'll find their way around them as kids have done for decades and decades. But it's more about talking with the students about what they're supposed to learn out of an assignment, and what role AI might be able to play in that. To help them learn what they're supposed to learn, but not take away that learning. Is that fair?

Dakota

Yeah.

Whit

Okay. Dakota, thank you. I really appreciate you joining today and talking to the audience from the student's perspective about what you're facing with AI. I think this is a really important transition and we plan to continue the conversation. Thanks for being here.

End