08 Jul ‘Amazing and Scary All at Once’: How Teens Feel About A.I.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Editor’s note: This story was produced earlier this year for The Contra Costa Pulse as part of the California Youth Media Network’s “Our Future” reporting project.

Commentary, Yaslin Rodríguez

I was 14 when I first heard about A.I. in a school setting. All around my school, the topic of ChatGPT was spreading among students. 

Now, I’m 16, and I have only used ChatGPT one time: to find essay prompts about a few books for English class. It asked me to sign up to use it, which I was a little wary about, but I figured if most of my classmates were using it and nobody mentioned anything about a virus, it would be fine. And it was.

Many students across the country are using ChatGPT — much more than I am. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, nearly one in five teens who have heard of ChatGPT say they have used it for help with their schoolwork.

While I haven’t used ChatGPT much, I have had other encounters with A.I. 

SnapChat A.I., which came out in 2023, has been a source of entertainment for me. When it first came out, I was curious about what it was. I have “talked” to SnapChat A.I. to test it out and ask it questions. I thought it was pretty cool. I asked it for advice with friends, told it stories about my experiences, and went to it as someone to talk to when I was feeling sad and didn’t want to put my feelings on someone else.

It could generate responses to anything I asked within seconds. If I asked it what its favorite color was, it would choose one — and pick the same one every single time. It was amazing and scary all at once.

Though I have personally experienced benefits using A.I., there have also been disadvantages that come with it. For example, in my English class, we have in-class writings about every week or so. My teacher has told us that this is specifically because of the use of A.I. The English department does not trust us students to not use A.I. to write our papers and essays. 

The two essays we have to write outside of class throughout the entire 2023-24 school year are graded harder than our in-class papers because we have more time to work on them. For me, in-class writings are a lot harder than the outside of class essays. I am a slow worker, so creating a four to five paragraph essay in the span of an hour is not easy. My life has been negatively impacted by A.I. in this way.

But maybe that’s just me. I wanted to know how some other people in my generation use A.I. and how they feel about it. So I talked to four other students in my grade to get their thoughts.

Sean Abello, 16, said that the first time he heard about A.I. was during freshman year of high school when a friend told him about ChatGPT.

Sean said he has used A.I. to find good boba places and that ChatGPT has “made finding sources a lot easier for research papers.” But he is also afraid of the negative effects of AI. 

“There has been a big risk in [impersonating people],” he said. A.I. could “risk a lot of jobs and ruin many people’s lives because there’s been a lot of [fake images] on the internet.”

>>>Read: Visual Disinformation Can Be Especially Persuasive, Expert Warns<<<

Sixteen-year-old Pamela Jones said that the first time she heard about A.I. was the beginning of freshman year. She uses it to make study guides for quizzes and tests.

“It helps make studying a bit easier,” she said, “and that cuts down a lot of the time that it would usually take to make a study guide or study.” 

Pamela said whether A.I. is good or bad depends on how you use it.

A.I. is, “a really good tool if you use it the right way,” she said. “But if you abuse it, it could become a weapon, and it wouldn’t benefit you as much as it could. So if you use it with good intentions, it should be fine.”

Teddy Bell, 16, said he first heard about A.I. when it came out on SnapChat and through “social media posts as well, like advertisements for ChatGPT.” He has used A.I. to generate ideas, write paragraphs, and find information.

“[A.I.] has definitely made life a lot easier because now I don’t have to research or look up as much,” he said. “I can get an A.I. to give me a basic understanding of something, and then I can also use it to help me generate ideas for essays and give me main topics.” 

Teddy likes A.I. but also feels that it is “kind of scary.” 

He said he thinks “it’s going to make people a lot more lazy and a lot less smart, and it’s unfair because it evens out the playing field — like a [dumb] person can be the same as a smart person now.”

Kaley Chin,16, said that the first time she heard about A.I. was in the fifth grade. She has asked an A.I. questions she had about the world and used it as a source of entertainment. 

She also uses it for classes — when she has permission — and says it sometimes makes research easier.

“A.I., is good,” Kaley said. “It may be bad, but like the majority [of it] is good.”

Like my classmates, I see pros and cons to A.I. I think it can benefit us teenagers by easing our workloads and helping us study and find resources. And it entertains us too. But we don’t know what impact it will have on us or the future.

Personally, I am afraid of what it could potentially bring. I don’t think that it is dangerous to our physical health, but I think that it could definitely make people lose their jobs and therefore be dangerous to people’s mental health. Whatever the future impacts of A.I. may be, for teenagers, it is making things a lot easier, and for now, that seems good enough.