Julian Pablo
English 211C
Professor Timothy Lockhart
1 December 2025
Final Research Paper
Guiding Students to Ethical AI
Introduction
The hot topic almost everyone is talking about online, AI. AI is constantly growing and improving to become more efficient. It has reached many different job fields like computer science, health care, and engineering; however, I’d like to dive deeper into how AI has affected schools.
One of the biggest starts to AI becoming as mainstream as it is today was the release of ChatGPT— “The public release of ChatGPT in 2022 marked a significant milestone by showcasing unprecedented capabilities in natural language, understanding, and generation, fueling further advancements in AI” (Iowa, Paragraph 4). Many students took notice to this tool and started to utilize it for school.
It became clear that AI has been used widely among students, and a 2024 survey from the American Psychological Association showed about 7 out of 10 students have at least used one form of generative AI with tasks like homework (Abrams, 70). With the rise of AI, teachers and school boards were starting become very conflicted. Many found AI to be another form of cheating as generative AI can easily create full essays and reports. There is also potential of AI creating false and unreliable information as well.
On the contrary, there are student and teacher advocates that support the use of AI. Many argue it can be used as a tool for assisting students in the learning process and make tasks easier for teachers. I believe that AI can be used in a beneficial way to help students learn if used correctly and under the proper guidance from teachers.
Benefits
The idea of generative AI is that it can produce concise and quick results to any prompt it’s given. These attributes of AI have opened up the possibility of making these applications into personal tutors. Researchers put a lot of effort to make systems that will tailor to adapt to a student’s learning style or even certain disabilities (Abrams, 70).
Almost every student has their own unique learning style and pace. There are some students who are auditory learners, some who prefer having things drawn out, and some who are more practical or interactive learners. How fast a student learns also differs from topic to topic as they have their strong suits and weak points–it’s especially harder on the kids who have learning disabilities that limit their learning speeds,
All the factors mentioned previously have to constantly be taken account when teachers or tutors are giving lessons. The truth is they won’t be able to tailor their lessons to all students’ needs without taking a heavy amount of planning, time, and resources. It would take an immense number of staff and tutors to personally teach all these different students’ needs and pacing.
The implementation of these tutor systems would gradually help with this problem. It has already been found that AI has been able to detect students’ behavior and patterns that teachers can possibly miss (U.S Department of Education, 14). The programs can also track grades and how they progress through certain topics. The instant feedback allows students to know instantly what they got right and what they got wrong.
There are quite a few different ways AI has been shown to tailor its content to different audiences. AI has recently reached Greece Second Chance Schools made for adults which typically have very diverse learning backgrounds (Sachpatzidis, 1). It allows for a more personalized experience even for adults with very different backgrounds and learning styles.
The generative part of AI allows people to get creative with how they can display problems. Teachers have found they can create images that help depict harder and more abstract vocab words. It also allows the creation of math problems that relate to real world problems to engage the mind more critically (Iowa, Paragraphs 16-17).
When trying to do practice problems, people often struggle to find an answer or even where to begin, but AI is able to guide you through it all. Plugging these problems into AI not only showcases the answer but also reveals the step-by-step process on how to get the answer. It allows the student to learn from what they initially struggled on and apply it to their future problems.
While students gain many benefits from the use of AI, teachers get just as much out of it. According to research done by Carnegie Learning on teachers who’ve used AI, “42% found administrative tasks to be easier, 25% had it assist in personal learning, 18% had increase student engagement, 17% had increased student learning outcomes, and only 1% found no benefit with using AI (Slagg, Paragraph 10).
Administrative tasks such as grading, sending out messages, and attendance are all time-consuming tasks the average teacher has to deal with. Having an AI system to deal with these types of tasks releases some of the work load off of teachers and gives them more time to spend with their students.
AI in a sense can almost work like a teacher assistant as it can give many recommendations and fill in gaps that are needed. It can create lesson plans either based on the teachers’ previous ones or more tailored towards the student’s current performance. It leaves room for many ideas to be generated to create a baseline on how the teacher can plan their day. It’s even seen as a possibility in the future to perform tasks like filling in as a student in a group discussion/assignment (U.S Department of Education, 15).
These are all advantages of AI that students and teachers have found in fairly early stages of AI—technology for AI is constantly growing to this day. As AI gets even smarter and more efficient, it can open up many new routes in how it can assist in teaching schools worldwide.
Misuse of AI
It’s important to note that many teachers worry on the misuse of AI is true. AI can very much be used in the wrong ways, and students should know how to ethically use AI without jeopardizing their integrity as a student.
The elephant in the room to address is using AI to completely generate entire essays or other assignment without putting any self-effort. This was most evident when ChatGPT first erupted in schools where students took advantage of generating all their work from the tool, and ChatGPT became known as another means for students to cheat and undermine the school system. “If students learn to cheat and take shortcuts in classrooms, what kind of citizens will they make when they are finished with their education?” (Office of Communications, Paragraph 24).
So exactly where is it a good idea to use generative AI applications like ChatGPT and OpenAI? The best way to explain it would be to look at these applications more as a helper/guider rather than an answer key. For example, many teachers generally don’t give an answer straight away, and they guide them by walking the students down the process and steps to get the right answer.
In more practical terms AI can be used when practicing and doing homework on topics that one may not know too well. Applications like Mathway and Photomath are examples of AI apps that can do this function—they essentially look at math problems the students send and generate the step-by-step process on how to get the answer. Using these applications on tests and quizzes are obviously not a good idea, but using them during self-study and practice problems are a great way to properly understand topics with AI.
AI does have a place in the writing process as well. It should be clear to not let AI generate your whole essay, but using it as a contributor in the early writing process can prove beneficial. A survey done on multiple students and teachers at a U.S university on where AI can be used during the writing process generally agreed brainstorming and outlining are acceptable points to use AI (Barret, Pack, Section 5).
Having AI generate possible ideas during the brainstorming process allows students pick and choose ideas they can incorporate in their writing without the AI doing all the heavy lifting of writing the entire essay. The ideas made all may be ones the writer may not have originally thought of which can strengthen their overall perspective. For more visual people, it can help to have all the writers’ ideas be generated into a mind map to allow a rough outline on how to format their talking points on the essay. Just as mentioned before, AI should serve as a guidance for students without taking away the parts that make students do the hard work and critical thinking.
AI also has the ability to access and look up resources that can ease the search by students, so how can this be a misuse? On the students part it should be noted to not trust all resource pulled by AI at face value. “AI is only as accurate or inaccurate as their algorithm” (Office of Communications, Paragraph 26)—with this statement in mind, any source pulled from AI can be just be as inaccurate or biased as the algorithm. To avoid this, make sure to always properly look into the source and evaluate if it’s an actual reliable source.
Guiding Students and Teachers
As shown before, there are many ways to benefit from AI, but there are also many ways for students to misuse AI. There are too many students who misuse AI in school as they don’t have the proper guidance on how to ethically use AI. The role of guiding these students properly should fall under the teachers care.
Teachers need to address the obvious of where AI is not acceptable like tests and other graded assignments and where it is acceptable like practice and brainstorming. It should also be taken into consideration of what AIs should be used as some are prone to inaccuracies and bias. The most important thing to teach these kids is that AI should be a supportive/supplemental tool rather than an easy shortcut.
In order to properly teach kids about AI, teacher should familiarize their selves with proper training on ethical AI. However, it has been seen that there is a sever lack of proper ethical AI training for teacher put forth by school boards. A group of teachers and students were surveyed with about 95% of both groups saying they haven’t received AI training and 90% teachers stating they haven’t taught their students about AI (Barret, Pack, Section 5).
It’s insane to think with how much AI has been prominent that there is still a lack of proper AI policies. Many administrators that have put forth AI policies typically ban the use of AI altogether aligning with their student’s honor codes. Banning AI fully is a waste of potential as it can be used a major supportive tool for both students and teachers. AI in schools is still very controversial with many administrators focusing on the possible negatives rather the positives.
Other Challenges/Concerns
AI has many benefits that can help out thousands of different schools. Unfortunately, it isn’t as easy to implement these types of changes for everyone with a few flaws.
Implementation of AI can prove to both be expensive for schools and overall lack of technical infrastructure to support these programs (Iowa, Paragraph 26). This type of challenge can be seen as a “digital divide” between schools who don’t have access to these types of online resources making it unfair for disadvantaged groups (Sachpatzidis, 2).
Security and privacy issues are also of concern as AI is still relatively new. Any new piece of software will always raise security question especially when implementing in important sectors like schools. A lot of testing would need to be done before making a big change like this.
AI may also have psychological effects on younger students. The overreliance of AI can lead younger students to feel more comfortable talking to machines rather than having social interactions (Abrams, 70).
On the topic of psychological effects, many may raise concerns over whether using generative AI may deter students from actually thinking on their own. For example, when students want to use AI to organize or make an outline of their ideas for a paper it could teach student to overly on it—the scenario could inhibit students actually learning how to have critical skill like organizing on their own.
However, as previously mentioned the important thing about AI for students to see it as a supplemental learning tool and not to overly on it. A resolution to the above scenario is to do a practice paper where you can have the AI generate an outline but also prompt the steps it took to make the outline. The student would then apply what they learned from the practice to real papers with their own creative liberty.
Another questionable aspect that comes with the growth of AI is actually AI not sounding AI. In the early stages of AI and even somewhat true today it’s clear to tell human made writing and AI generated. As AI gets more advanced the clarity between human made and AI will eventually become much more obscure.
Even today many AI programs will try to promote not sounding AI which can heavily be targeted towards students who may want to cheat. The target market on its own is unethical, but the advancement of AI will push these companies forward even more. This shows that there will be uncontrollable factors that will come with further advancements.
Conclusion and Future of AI
Overall, AI has many unseen benefits for both student and teachers that constantly get overshadowed by the negatives. Many people think of it as an easy generative shortcut rather than an academic tool. Both students and teachers simply need the proper training on how to properly use AI.
AI is still not perfect with a few flaws that haven’t been properly tested out, and it will have many unforeseen advancements in the future either good or bad. Making AI a common tool in school would be a major shift, so it would definitely take time to tweak out everything. However, with proper time, research, and testing AI will become even more beneficial with more capabilities to help our future students. The challenge now is to open the eyes of the reluctant to what AI can really do for our students and teachers.
Works Cited
Abrams, Zara. “Classrooms are Adapting to the Use of Artificial Intelligence.” American Psychological Association, vol.56, no.1, (2025, January 1), pg.70, www.apa.org/monitor/2025/01/trends-classrooms-artificial-intelligence
“AI in Schools: Pros and Cons.” Office of Communications, College of Education. (2024, October 24). education.illinois.edu/about/news-events/news/article/2024/10/24/ai-in-schools–pros-and-cons
“Artificial Intelligence and Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations.” U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology, (2023).
www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/documents/ai-report/ai-report.pdf
Barret, Alex. Pack, Austin. “Not Quite Eye to AI.: Student and Teacher Perspectives on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Writing Process.” International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 20, 59, (2023). educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41239-023-00427-0
Sachpatzidis, Avraam. “A.I. and Adult Education in Greek Second Chance Schools: A Blessing or a Curse?” International Academic Conference on Teaching, Learning and Education (November, 2024) www.dpublication.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/2-TNF6-7101.pdf
Slagg, Alexander. “AI in Education in 2024: Educators Express Mixed Feelings on the Technology’s Future.” EdTech, (2024, September 30). edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2024/09/ai-education-2024-educators-express-mixed-feelings-technologys-future-perfcon
“The role of AI in modern education.” Iowa College of Education (August 27, 2024) onlineprograms.education.uiowa.edu/blog/role-of-ai-in-modern-education