As a student myself growing up in this generation of technological advancement, I have seen the evolution of AI in the school systems, and I have also seen how AI has changed how my peers and I think. AI is at the tip of our fingers wherever we go. It takes only two seconds before you can have a chatbot open that has the answers to any question imaginable. Many of the questions school assignments pose are meant to stimulate creative and critical thinking. The majority of the parts of the brain that are still changing and evolving during the teenage years are the parts that fuel creativity and critical thinking skills. With a tool like AI being so dangerously widespread, the creative and critical parts of our brain can go offline while a chatbot solves our problems.
AI didn’t grow into this massively used tool on its own. The mental health crisis that has gripped teenagers in our country has undoubtedly played a gigantic role in the rise of AI. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates around 20% of the entire teenage population in the U.S suffers from major depressive episodes. When a child is experiencing feelings of hopelessness, extreme sadness, and numbness, all the energy that person has is expended on getting out of bed in the morning. AI became a tool teenagers could lean on when expectations amounted to too much. To stop the spread of AI, first, young adults need to be given adequate support when experiencing a mental health crisis.
Lucy Zraunig
Montague