What’s Really Going On With AI In Schools? A High School Student’s POV

There’s a conversation about Artificial Intelligence happening in school administration offices and teacher social media circles. It’s full of words like “disruption,” “guardrails,” and “the future of work.” Then there’s the conversation happening in high school students’ group chats. It’s about how to get the history essay done by 11 PM.The two conversations have almost nothing to do with each other.I recently had a chance to talk with William Liang, a high school student from San Jose, California, and frankly, he offered one of the clearest views I’ve heard yet on what’s actually happening on the ground. This isn’t just any student. William is a seriously impressive high school journalist, with published work in places like the San Francisco Chronicle and The San Diego Union-Tribune. He’s living and breathing this stuff every day, and his message is simple: our school system is playing a game of checkers while its students are mastering 3D chess. The way we teach and test kids is fundamentally broken in the age of AI, and our attempts to "catch" them are missing the point entirely.It’s All About the IncentivesHere’s the first truth bomb William dropped, and it reframes the entire issue. We need to accept that for a huge number of students, an assignment isn’t a journey of intellectual discovery.“For most students, an assignment is not interpreted as a cognitive development tool, but as a logistical hurdle,” he told me. Think about that. It’s a hurdle to be cleared as efficiently as possible. “Right now,” he said, “that mechanism is generative AI.”This isn't really about kids being lazy or immoral. It's about them being smart players in a game we designed. For decades, the system has screamed one thing above all else: grades matter more than understanding. When the goal is the A grade, and a tool exists that gets you there in a fraction of the time, why wouldn't you use it?As William put it, “If there’s an easy shortcut, why wouldn’t we take it?”...