AI is increasingly becoming part of school with an "integrate first" approach that bypasses risk assessment.

Several studies suggest that while using AI can help get work done faster, longer-term learning is impaired.

AI literacy should include an understanding of potential harms, including the cost of using chatbots to cheat.

I cheated in school as a kid. Sort of.

When I was in junior high, I gave other students the answers to homework and test questions. I did it because they asked and because, as someone lying somewhere on the nerd spectrum, I wanted to be liked. Of course, giving out answers wasn’t helping the other kids learn, so you could argue that I was doing them a disservice by enabling them to cheat.

As a parent now, I make my elementary school child do extra-curricular homework. I choose work that challenges him beyond the classroom, and I help him through it, but although he might ask for the easy way out, I never do the work for him. That would, after all, defeat the whole purpose of having him do it in the first place.

Kids today probably don’t ask other students for the answers anymore. Or at least not as much. Why would they, when they can just ask an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot instead?

Cognitive Debt, Laziness, and Atrophy

AI technology is increasingly being incorporated into education, from elementary school through college. Often, this is happening with an “integrate first” philosophy that reserves questions about safety and utility for later.1,2 The underlying justification—put forth by the companies with a financial stake in the success of AI who are signing multi-million dollar contracts with schools to implement their products—is that AI dominance is an inevitability, so kids today need to be familiar with it so they don’t get left behind. And yet, both students and parents alike are now worrying about whether AI is really helping or actually hurting kids. Some are saying that they even hate AI, both because it’s being forced upon them and because of fears that it might be counter-productive to learning by breeding cognitive laziness.2

What’s the evidence that this is true? One of the first such claims came from an as-of-yet unpublished study from the MIT Media Lab that found lower “cognitive engagement” and “cognitive load” as measured by electroencephalography (EEG) when students used AI chatbots to complete writing tasks compared to those who used Google searches or no such aids.3 Personally, I take this finding with a grain of salt, in part because........

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