AI models are being unleashed into schools across the world, in a massive experiment on kids with uncertain results.
Now, fresh research provides a clue about the tech’s effects on children’s education, and it’s not promising. According to a new study from Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education, AI poses profound risks to children’s social and intellectual development — and the consequences could be dire.
“At this point in its trajectory, the risks of utilizing generative AI in children’s education overshadow its benefits,” reads the report, which should give pause to school teachers across the America who have increased their use of AI from 34 to 61 percent.
The year-long project came to this alarming conclusion after interviews, consultations and discussion panels with 505 students, parents, teachers, education leaders, and tech professionals in 50 countries, plus a review of hundreds of other AI studies.
One way AI models are undermining kids’ education: kids are offloading their thinking onto AI models, with even 65 percent of students surveyed expressing concern that the trend will lead to cognitive decline.
“It’s easy. You don’t need to [use] your brain,” one student told the study’s researchers, summing up the peril of over reliance on AI tools.
The danger is that when kids offload thinking on a model, they become disengaged learners who passively accept AI models’ outputs. They can even start forgetting things that they had learned in class because the AI models retain memories and information for them.
“If students can just replace their actual learning and their ability to communicate what they know with something that’s produced outside of them and get credit for it, what purpose do they have to actually learn?” one teacher said in the study.
And because these models are always available, and at times sycophantic, kids aren’t learning appropriate social skills from chatbots when it comes to dealing with difficult situations, according to the study. In addition, these models not only undermine relationships between teachers and students, but also between kids and parents because kids feel they can divulge anything to chatbots — to sometimes fatal effect, as seen in news reports of children dying by suicide after becoming obsessed with AI relationships.
“They create an illusion of connection that is difficult to distinguish from genuine rapport,” an unidentified panelist told the report’s researchers. “Young people may gravitate toward AI precisely because it is undemanding, frictionless, and always available. But relationships, at their core, are not about ease. They require negotiation, patience, and the ability to sit with discomfort. We learn empathy not when we are perfectly understood, but when we misunderstand and recover.”
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