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A note on teens using AI
Kind of long but REALLY important for your teen's success
This email isn’t to preach about whether AI is good or bad - there’s plenty of both - but to look at what happens to our teens’ brains and learning when they use AI for schoolwork.
I’m not talking about teachers using AI in the classroom. I mean students using it at home to finish homework, write essays, do research etc. That’s the world I live in every day and I’m overdue to share what I’ve seen and learned.
Spoiler: it’s not good.
Using AI to complete assignments decreases learning skills. I’ve observed this firsthand extensively, and the data is starting to pile up.
As someone who teaches learning skills - who knows that students who strengthen these skills benefit not just from higher grades but more confidence, motivation and focus inside and outside the classroom - this is alarming.
Given that AI is here to stay and will become increasingly integrated into our lives, it’s not realistic to tell our teens to simply not use it.
Full disclosure: I tried this. After the first few times of seeing work clearly produced by AI instead of my students’ own (brilliant and capable) minds, I told them they could not use AI to do their work.
This didn’t work for a lot of reasons. Not only is it unrealistic to try to blanket ban its usage, but future employability will be shaped in part by their skills to leverage AI for greater efficiency, productivity and impact.
Remember when resumes use to say “Proficient in Word and Excel”? Theirs will say something like “Proficient with LLM’s including ChatGPT, Claude and Grok.”
So how do we protect our teens’ brains and potential from being robbed by AI, while preparing them to navigate an increasingly AI-informed world?
To offer a (partial but hopefully helpful) answer, I’m going to go over what the science says about the impact of AI on your teen’s brain and share a few things to know that can support them in using AI strategically, to help instead of harm their thinking.
All of that is below. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions you’ve found work well for your teen when it comes to using their own brain consistently to learn and do schoolwork. It feels weird to even write that, but alas - these are the times we’re in.
Talk soon,
Kelsey
Let’s start with the science, specifically this study from MIT released last month.
Researchers separated participants into three groups to write an essay: those using
💻️ a large language model (LLM, e.g. AI like ChatGPT)
🔍️ a search engine
🧠 brain only
They found significantly different “neural connectivity patterns” across these groups. Specifically:
“Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support.”
Brain connectivity refers to how different parts of the brain communicate and work together as a network. It covers physical pathways between brain regions, patterns of synchronized activity and how one region affects others.
The stronger and more active these connections are, the better our brains are at learning, problem-solving, planning, focusing etc.
Stronger brain connectivity = stronger thinking = greater capacity to succeed
This MIT study found that students who used AI to write their essay had the weakest brain connectivity.
Those in the search engine group had moderate connectivity.
Those using their brain only had the strongest.
Interestingly, students in the brain-only group who then switched to using AI had higher neural connectivity - their brains worked better compared to the students who used AI first and then switched to their own brain.
The brain-only group had strong activations in the parts of their brain responsible for executive functioning, self-regulation, writing and editing. Comparatively, the AI group had up to 55% reduced brain connectivity.
—> This stat is staggering. If your laptop lost half its processing power, it would move a lot slower and you’d probably replace it (thank you @forgoodcode for the analogy). But when students offload their thinking to AI, that’s essentially what happens - their cognitive power drops and things feel harder.
The AI group also struggled to provide even a single quote from their essay - they couldn’t remember what was in it. Researchers suspect this is because they bypassed “deep memory encoding processes.” The brain-only and search engine groups? Deeper processing and “stronger integration of content into memory systems.”
Unsurprisingly, AI impacted students’ perceived ownership over their work. The brain-only group reported full ownership, while the majority of the AI group took partial ownership.
When human teachers scored the essays - without any details about the group assignments - they recognized the distinctive AI-style writing.
The study concluded that its findings “support the view that external support tools restructure not only task performance but also the underlying cognitive architecture.”
Delegating thinking to AI for a single task doesn’t just impact how your teen does that task - it restructures their brain.
If your teen is going to use AI for schoolwork - as many students do these days - here are a few things they should know:
Use your brain first, always.
Keep using only your brain until you’ve been struggling for at least a few minutes without any progress.
If you need help beyond your own brain, use Google or YouTube or whatever search engine you prefer. This still involves your brain to sift through and identify helpful or relevant information.
The more you use AI to do your thinking, the weaker your own brain becomes (literally - use it or lose it).
AI might help you sound smart temporarily but using your brain to learn and struggle and persist when things feel hard is what actually makes you smarter.
If you use AI to do the heavy lifting, teachers know. Tutors know. It’s obvious.
When using AI, use prompts that facilitate rather than replace thinking:
Example 1
Bad: “Write an essay about the causes of World War II.”
Better: “What are three ways to start researching the causes of World War II? Can you share some credible sources to get me started?”
Example 2
Bad: “Summarize this article for me.”
Better: “What should I pay attention to when summarizing this article for myself? Can you give me a brief checklist to follow?”
Example 3
Bad: “Solve this math problem for me.”
Better: “I’m stuck on this math problem. Can you walk me through the first step and explain why it’s the right starting point?”
AI isn’t the enemy - its unchecked use is. When our teens learn to use it as a tool, not a crutch, they build the kind of thinking and learning skills that no algorithm can replace.
If you want your teen to learn how to learn - not just for better grades but to feel more confident and in control (even with AI in the mix) - I have 3 spots left for 1:1 support this Fall. Book a call here. We’ll do a deep dive into your situation and see if we’re the right fit to work together.