The risks of using generative artificial intelligence to educate children and teens currently outweigh the benefits, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education.
The extensive study includes focus groups and interviews with K-12 students, parents, educators, and technical experts in 50 countries, as well as a literature review of hundreds of research articles. It found that the use of artificial intelligence in education could “undermine children’s basic development” and that the “damage it has already caused is daunting”, although “reparable”.
Because generative artificial intelligence is still young – ChatGPT was released more than three years ago — the report’s authors called their review a “post-mortem” designed to study the potential of AI in the classroom without the post-mortem benefits of time, long-term data or hindsight.
Here are some of the pros and cons of the report, along with a sampling of the study’s recommendations for teachers, parents, school administrators and government officials:
Pros: AI can help students learn to read and write
Teachers interviewed for this report said that AI can be helpful when it comes to language acquisition, especially for students who are learning a second language. For example, AI can adjust the difficulty of a passage depending on the reader’s skill, offering privacy to students struggling in large groups.
Teachers have reported that AI can also help improve student writing if it is used to support students’ efforts rather than doing the work for them: “Teachers report that AI can ‘spark creativity’ and help students overcome writer’s block. … In the drafting stage, it can help with organization, coherence, syntax, semantics, and grammar. In the revising and rewriting of ideas stage, AI can well support editing, rewriting of ideas. capitalization and grammar.”
But if there’s a refrain in the message, it’s this: AI is most useful when it complements, not replaces, the efforts of a physical teacher.
Cons: AI poses a serious threat to students’ cognitive development
At the top of Brookings’ list of risks is the negative impact artificial intelligence can have on children’s cognitive growth — how they learn new skills and perceive and solve problems.
The report describes a sort of doomsday loop of AI addiction, where students increasingly shift their own thinking to the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline, or atrophy, more commonly associated with aging brains.
Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report’s authors and a senior fellow at Brookings, warns: “When kids use generative artificial intelligence to tell them what the answer is…they’re not thinking for themselves. They’re not learning to sort truth from fiction. They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives on the world because they’re not really engaging with the material.”“
Cognitive relaxation is nothing new. The report points out that keyboards and computers have reduced the need for handwriting, and calculators have automated basic math. But AI has been “turbocharging” that kind of workload, especially in schools where learning can seem transactional.
As one student told the researchers, “It’s easy. You don’t need to (use) your brain.”
The report offers plenty of evidence to suggest that students who use generative AI are already seeing declines in content knowledge, critical thinking, and even creativity. And this could have huge consequences if these young people grow into adults without learning how to think critically.
Pros: Artificial intelligence can make teachers’ jobs a little easier
Another benefit of AI, the report says, is that it allows teachers to automate some tasks: “generating emails to parents … translating materials, creating worksheets, rubrics, quizzes and lesson plans” – and more.
The report cites numerous research studies that have found important time-saving benefits for teachers, including one US study that found that teachers using artificial intelligence save an average of nearly six hours per week and about six weeks over the course of the school year.
Pro/Con: AI can be an engine of justice – or injustice
One of the strongest arguments in favor of educational use of AI, according to the Brookings report, is its ability to reach children who have been excluded from the classroom. The researchers cite Afghanistan, where girls and women were denied access to formal post-primary education by the Taliban.
according to the report one program for Afghan girls “used AI to digitize the Afghan curriculum, create lessons based on that curriculum and disseminate content in Dari, Pashto and English through WhatsApp lessons.”
AI can also help make classrooms more accessible for students with a wide range of learning disabilities, including dyslexia.
However, Winthrop warns that “AI can also greatly increase existing disparities.” That’s because the free AI tools most accessible to students and schools can also be the least reliable and least factually accurate.
“We know that wealthier communities and schools will be able to afford more advanced AI models,” says Winthrop, “and we know that those more advanced AI models are more accurate. Which means that for the first time in ed-tech history, schools are going to have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources.”
Features: AI poses a serious threat to social and emotional development
Survey responses revealed deep concern that the use of artificial intelligence, especially chatbots, “undermines students’ emotional well-being, including their ability to form relationships, bounce back from setbacks, and maintain mental health,” the report said.
One of the many problems with the overuse of AI by children is that the technology is inherently condescending – it was designed to reinforce the beliefs of the users.
Winthrop says that if children are building social-emotional skills largely through interactions with chatbots that have been designed to agree with them, “it’s very uncomfortable to be in an environment where someone disagrees with you.”
Winthrop offers the example of a child interacting with a chatbot, “complaining about your parents and saying, ‘They want me to do the dishes—that’s so annoying. I hate my parents.’ The chatbot will probably say, ‘You’re right. You are misunderstood. I’m very sorry. I understand you.’ Compared to a friend who would say, ‘Dude, I wash the dishes all the time at home. I don’t know what you are complaining about. That’s normal.” That’s the problem.”
A recent survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age, found that nearly 1 in 5 high school students said they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with an artificial intelligence. And 42% of students in this survey said they or someone they know has used AI as a company.
The report warns that the echo chamber of artificial intelligence can stunt a child’s emotional growth: “We don’t learn empathy when they understand us perfectly, but when we don’t understand and recover,” said one of the experts interviewed.
what to do with it
The Brookings report offers a long list of recommendations to help parents, teachers, and policymakers—not to mention tech companies themselves—take advantage of AI without exposing children to the risks the technology currently poses. Among these recommendations:
- The training itself could be less focused on what the report calls “completing a transactional task” or an end game based on grades, and more focused on fostering curiosity and a desire to learn. Students will be less inclined to ask AI to do work for them if they feel engaged with the work.
- Artificial intelligence designed for use by children and adolescents should be less condescending and more “antagonistic,” challenging preconceived notions and challenging users to think and evaluate.
- Tech companies could collaborate with educators in “co-design centers.” In the Netherlands, a government center is already bringing together technology companies and educators to develop, test and evaluate new applications of artificial intelligence in the classroom.
- Holistic AI literacy is essential—for both teachers and students. Some countries, including China and Estonia, have comprehensive national AI literacy guidelines.
- As schools continue to embrace AI, it’s important that underfunded neighborhoods in marginalized communities aren’t left behind, allowing AI to further promote inequality.
- Governments have a duty to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in schools and ensure that the technology used protects students’ cognitive and emotional health, as well as their privacy. In the US, the Trump administration has tried to ban states from regulating AI on their own, although Congress has so far failed to create a federal regulatory framework.
With this “pre-death,” the authors argue, the time to act is now. The risks of AI to children and adolescents are already abundant and obvious. The good news is that many medications do, too.
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