As the next school year starts up, students and families alike are preparing for those early mornings, fall sports, long study hours, and reconnecting with classmates and teachers for the first time since June.
One thing that’s been on everyone’s back to school mind this year, including my own, is artificial intelligence. Whether you like it or not, it’s here to stay, and education is seeing those effects, too.
As an upcoming senior at Franklin County Technical School, I find myself in a unique position in the AI age.
In elementary and middle school, I lived in a pre-AI internet time. If you Googled something, you had to find it through long lists of websites and forums. There was no “AI-Summary” or “Write me an essay” bot. I never had to worry about writing too robotically to make sure my writing didn’t look AI generated. I’m so grateful to have spent time in this era.
Now, in my senior year of high school, AI is unrecognizable from just a few years ago. The line between identifying what’s real and what’s fake has thinned. I’m often left to question almost everything I see online. And I know I’m not the only person left feeling this way. But I am just as, if not more grateful to live in this internet age as well; this is a defining age.
It’s almost impossible to go anywhere online without seeing AI. Google, Amazon, YouTube, Reddit, X/Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are now full of AI tools, advertisements, and misinformation that looks believable to many.
AI has been moving faster than bureaucratic systems can keep up. If Congress were to pass an AI law today, there is a likely chance it will be completely irrelevant in under six months. It requires things like regulatory subcommittees, consulting with experts, conducting research, not a simple one and done glance.
Which brings me back to my main point, education. Much like the government at all levels, School Committees don’t move fast enough to keep up with the rapid advancement of technology either.
Perhaps the best example we have are cellphones. While schools always took phones and made students put them away, students became crafty with them starting in the early 2010s. Teachers always had the authority to tell a student to put it away, yet still faced the distraction of hidden phones. It was only a few years ago that advanced protocols and school-wide phone policies like Yondr pouches were established.
AI will not wait 15 years for schools to react. When I talk about AI regulation in schools, I don’t just talk about the students’ usage of it. I talk about the teachers, administrators, substitutes, guest speakers, and anyone else who might affect the learning environment.
Students should have a quality education — not something run solely by an algorithm, but instead run by years of training and education in the subject.
What these regulations look like, I leave to the experts, and those who know more than I do. But we have to start having these difficult conversations.
Going without AI policies in the year of 2026 and so forth is simply impossible. Not having these difficult conversations is by a mile the worst option that we can take.
One of the biggest concerns about AI that I hear is job security. Something I often hear is “Will my job be safe from being replaced by AI?” I believe the better question is instead “Will my job be safe from being affected by the overall economic effects of unregulated AI?” The answer is probably no.
You might be asking why I have spent time discussing the economic impacts of AI when this column’s title is about education. Well the fact of it is, schools produce the future. They give students an experience in a complex setting; how a school treats their students will reflect on what a student expects from life.
If students have no AI regulations in schools, they will be much less motivated to advocate for themselves and rights involving AI in the real world.
If schools treat AI like the complex things they are and deserve the best intention possible, it will give us all a much better chance of thriving in coexistence with AI, making the world a better place.
Aidan Pasic lives in Greenfield.