This story aired in the August 13, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
It’s back-to-school season again in the Bay Area. And with the new school year comes renewed conversations around how kids are engaging with new technology.
For over two years, any K through 12 student with an internet device has had access to ChatGPT and other powerful generative AI. Today's AI can quickly and effectively do many homework assignments. So what has that meant for our schools and education?
Click the button above to listen.
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Conversation between Hana Baba and Reporter Jesse Dukes:
HANA BABA: Reporter and researcher Jesse Dukes has been talking to teachers and students throughout California and across the country and joins me now. Hey, Jesse.
REPORTER JESSE DUKES: Hello.
HANA: So why Education and AI in particular. What got you interested in this?
JESSE: Well, I have been working with some professors at MIT who focus on education and technology for a few years. And a few years ago, the team interviewed some teachers who were talking about what it was like to be in the classroom when this powerful new technology, Chat GPT, showed up. And I found those conversations fascinating. And then by the fall of 2023, it was clear that the impact that AI was having on education was just the number one topic in anybody who was thinking about education and technology. And so, you know, there was a lot of excitement about the possibilities of perhaps AI to help education, but then there was also a lot of anxiety.
HANA: Let's stay on the excitement. What was the excitement about?
JESSE: Well, you have this powerful new technology that can do a lot of things. And in fact, students report all sorts of great ways of using AI perhaps to help them study, to get some ideas for an assignment, checking over their work if a teacher's okay with that. And then teachers are also saying there, some of them are experiencing some marginal benefits. Like they want to generate discussion questions for a text that is culturally relevant to their students. Maybe AI can quickly help them do that. Uh, chat GPT has proven to actually be very good at taking excerpts of a text and changing the reading level. So all the students in your class, um, can participate in that. And I think there's a lot of justifiable excitement about the potential for accessibility and helping students with learning disabilities. And all of that is in the mix.
HANA: Okay, so it sounds like a lot of teachers are enthusiastic about this, but then there's the others.
JESSE: Yeah, and you know, there are teachers who are not excited about this. There are skeptics, and then even the ones who are excited, I think, probably have some of the skepticism too. The big anxiety, and this was covered in the news in 2023, the big anxiety has been around cheating. Talking to teachers, it's clear that their concern around cheating or academic integrity has not diminished, and if anything, it has increased.
HANA: And it's increased why, what's happening.
JESSE: Well, AI is moving really fast. The bot is better at doing homework assignments.
HANA: Really?
JESSE: Yeah, they keep improving the models. General concern here is that AI can help a student bypass the learning that the teacher wants them to engage in with a particular assignment. And teachers are telling me that they're now spending a lot of time detecting cheating. And they're spending a lot of time having those conversations with students. And that's taking from time they could be spending teaching, instructing.
HANA: Whoo, and so what about schools? Have they had to change anything in their policies about what counts as cheating or how students should engage with AI? It sounds really tricky.
JESSE: The short answer is that many of them have not done that yet. We actually with MIT, we partnered with the RAND Corporation to do a study about this and only a quarter of teachers report getting any kind of updated policy guidance. Now that was in the fall of 2024, but I still hear from teachers and students that they have a lot of confusions about the AI policy and many teachers would say that they've really just been left to figure all of this out on their own.
HANA: So Jesse, this is gonna be a two part series. What are we gonna hear about today?
JESSE: Well, the first one is really gonna be about how we got here. So we're gonna hear from both teachers and students sharing stories of their first impression of this powerful, weird, strange, alarming, kind of exciting new technology that we call generative AI.
HANA: Let's listen.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: Nanki Kaur just graduated from American High School in Fremont. She remembers when AI showed up in her school.
NANKI KAUR: The first time I heard about ChatGPT was in my English class.
REPORTER: This was when Nanki was a junior, in the fall of 2023. She was talking with a fellow student.
NANKI KAUR: We were having a conversation about how we were going to approach our research paper assignment that was coming up, and you would have to pick an individual of American significance and prove why they were of American significance and what impact they had. And he was talking about how he just asked this AI platform about how his person of American significance – who was [BLEEP] – had an impact on America and he got a really strong thesis statement and he said, “I didn't even have to do anything.”
REPORTER: Now, I bleeped that last bit so this student won’t get in trouble. But the point here, Nanki says the thesis statement was actually pretty good.
NANKI KAUR: And we were all confused and we were like, “What are you talking about? Like how did you not have to do anything and how do you have such a strong thesis statement?” And he said, “There's this online platform, it's driven by artificial intelligence, and it just writes it for you. And it's, it's really thorough. It's really good. You guys should try it.” And so that was the first time I heard about it and I was shocked.
REPORTER: That platform was ChatGPT. And Nanki was interviewed by reporter Holly McDede, who you’ll hear.
HOLLY MCDEDE: Did you try it?
NANKI KAUR: I did go home and try it. I, not for the same assignment, but I went home and I looked it up like ChatGPT, Open AI, what is it? And then I asked it a couple questions like, “What is the weather like?” and “Can you write me a story about a given situation?” and it did write me a solid story, and I was shocked.
REPORTER: Nanki says she’s not sure what other the student did with his thesis statement, but she has a guess:
NANKI KAUR: So I think he did turn it in and I don't know what kind of disciplinary action he got, because there wasn't really much set in stone.
HOLLY MCDEDE: Do you suspect he didn't get any disciplinary action?
NANKI KAUR: I do suspect that because he was oddly smug about how well he had done on that assignment.
REPORTER: Again, this was the spring of 2023, just a few months after the company OpenAI launched ChatGPT. You’ve probably heard of it. ChatGPT is a kind of generative AI technology that anybody can use to quickly generate text or images, and it can do a really good job of imitating a person’s writing. For example, it can write a pretty good news script.
NEWSCASTER1: Tonight we're taking a deep dive into the world of AI.
NEWSCASTER2: Today we will be talking about ChatGPT Power. It may pose ethical risks to you.
NEWSCASTER3: With AI's power comes responsibility. Now, I didn't write that.
NEWSCASTER1: I asked ChatGPT to write that line for me.
NEWSCASTER2: ChatGPT wrote everything I just said.
NEWSCASTER3: In fact, the last two sentences I just read to you were written not by me, but by ChatGPT.
REPORTER: Yeah, when ChatGPT first dropped, newscasters everywhere had the same idea: Ask it to write your script. Those clips were all from December 2022, and just a couple months later, ChatGPT was still in the news, but now, the stories were about high school students using it.
NEWSCASTER4: …says 59% of the teachers believe one or more of their students have used generative AI for school purposes. So how does it work?
NEWSCASTER5: She's talking about ChatGPT. School districts like New York cities are banning…
NEWSCASTER6: ChatGPT is the new artificial intelligence tool causing a stir.
REPORTER: The attention wasn’t just negative. Some people – like technology developer Sal Kahn – thought it could be really helpful for education
SAL KHAN: We’re at the cusp of using AI for the biggest positive transition education has ever seen. The way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent, but amazing, personal tutor.
REPORTER: Devon O’Neil pretty much missed the first wave of ChatGPT hitting high schools. She’d been a high school social studies teacher in Oregon since 2017, but in 2021, she took two years away from the classroom while her husband was in grad school out of state. When she got back to the classroom in the fall of 2023, she started to notice something was odd.
DEVON O’NEIL: It was those two, like super crazy post COVID years. So I come back and it's like, like those movies where like the caveman, like defrosts or whatever, and they're like, “What is this?” I would have these really well written paragraphs, or snippets that looked to be very well-researched and all this, but not at all on topic. The grammar was off. Even the most brilliant 14-year-old still talks like a 14-year-old and still writes like a 14-year-old.
REPORTER: And she was surprised by the search engine her students were using on their laptops.
DEVON O’NEIL: Bing! I was noticing that a lot of them were using Bing to Google stuff. See [I even say] “To Google stuff.” And I was like, “That's the weirdest choice. Who uses Bing?”
REPORTER: And then, one day, she was watching a student complete a writing assignment in a Google document, and poof, a whole well-written paragraph just appeared, out of nowhere.
DEVON O’NEIL: Like one minute it’s not there, one minute it’s there. And it said, like, “Here are your results.” And they forgot to delete that.
REPORTER: O’Neil realized some of her students would copy and paste the questions she would give them right into Bing’s Copilot, which was a free way to use ChatGPT. Then, the students copied the answer, sometimes without any editing, right into their Google document.
DEVON O’NEIL: Which is kind of a rookie mistake. Like if they're gonna cheat, you want them to cheat a little bit better.
REPORTER: Since the fall of 2023, along with colleagues at MIT, I’ve interviewed over ninety teachers, and twenty five students, and we’ve visited several schools. We’ve been trying to learn what impact generative AI is having on education. Many teachers' first impressions of AI have been negative. They say their students are relying on ChatGPT to get their work done.
TEACHER1: You gotta learn to think for yourself before you use a tool to think for you. It feels dangerous to me. Use it as a tool, but learn how the sh*t works, first, you know.
TEACHER2: I want to see what you think about this. I can’t help you improve your writing if you’re not writing it, if AI is writing it for you.
REPORTER: Others note the disparity of the resources that have gone into AI, versus their schools.
TEACHER3: How many millions of dollars are we spending on ChatGPT, and we can’t even give my students hot water.
REPORTER: I wanted to see how teachers are managing the challenge of students using ChatGPT to do their work. I visited a high school math teacher named Maria. Her school let me visit and record as long as I didn’t identify it, so I’ll just say, it’s a neighborhood high school in a large urban school district in Southern California.
Sounds of classroom, teacher talking to groups working together.
REPORTER: Maria’s class is divided up into groups. She shares math problems with her students, and then gives them time to work on the problems together. While they work, she roams around, observing each group, offering support when they need it.
Sounds of classroom, teacher talking to groups working together.
MARIA: I would say in my classroom, my students definitely use some type of math, generative AI. I can't say it's sanctioned, as in, “Hey, I encourage you to do this.” But I also recognize that I have absolutely zero control of what they do at home. In my classes, I know a lot of them are using it to complete homework.
REPORTER: Is that a concern for you?
MARIA: Yes, it's a concern. Uh, but it's not like a full-on three alarm fire, okay? Right. Because they have access to the answers and there's all sorts of different resources available online anyway, at this point, for them to get help with their homework.
REPORTER: Part of the reason this isn’t a huge concern for Maria is that homework for her students is practice of the concepts they began learning in class.
MARIA: They hand write their homework. They don't turn it in, per se. I come around and I check to see if they do it.
Sounds of classroom, student sharing thought process with teacher.
MARIA: I will sometimes, if a student has a really well thought-out set of steps for solving a problem, but I know that that student struggles with that particular area or just in general, I might actually pause and then start asking them about what they did. “Oh, how did you know to do this? How did you get started?”
REPORTER: So Maria feels confident that she can tell if a student has learned the math concept or not, and often, she thinks she can tell if they just used AI to get the work done. In that case, she tries to have a gentle conversation.
MARIA: You know, I don't take issue with you accessing resources to help you do your homework, whether that's an older brother or sister, or the textbook. But what I take issue with is then how you use that information. If you simply copy what a computer has done for you, that's actually creating a situation where your brain's definitely not growing. And eventually, you know, if you continue to rely on things like that, your brain's actually going to atrophy to some respect, or you're gonna lose all the dendrite connections.
REPORTER: That’s very technical.
MARIA: Well, sometimes when you say it that way, it becomes less personal. Because basically what we're acknowledging is, “Hey kid, you've just kind of cheated on your homework. You tried to pass some work off that's not your own.” But let's talk about this in a way where it doesn't feel accusatory, it doesn't feel like they’re going to get in trouble. Let's instead try to create a conversation around when these tools are really powerful support for our learning, and at what point are these tools replacing our learning to the point where we are not better off because of it.
REPORTER: I’ve talked to a number of teachers who use strategies similar to Maria: monitor their students for AI use, avoid accusations, have conversations with students about when using AI on schoolwork is bad for learning, and set up classrooms in such a way that they are constantly getting opportunities to evaluate if students are learning or not.
While many teachers are concerned about their students using AI, some of them are more optimistic. One of the most optimistic I met is Eric Timmons, an English and film teacher at Santa Ana high school in Orange County.
ERIC TIMMONS: It is a progressive pathway that starts with narrative filmmaking…
REPORTER: He often teaches the same students from 9th grade to 12th.
ERIC TIMMONS:…finally ends with experimental filmmaking. And by the time students graduate, they are capable of producing short films on their own.
REPORTER: I really wish there's been a program like that in high school
ERIC TIMMONS: Right? Me too.
REPORTER: Timmons is like so many of the teachers we’ve talked to. He loves his job. But it keeps him very busy. He often stays at school until 7pm working with students on their films, and he still has to come up with lessons and activities for his classes.
ERIC TIMMONS: So being able to work with the smartest curriculum designer that's ever existed and have that at my disposal is incredible.
REPORTER: By “smartest curriculum designer” he means ChatGPT. Timmons often selects films, books, and readings he hopes his students will really connect with. And sometimes, there’s no off-the-shelf curriculum for hyper-local, relevant content. Like, recently he had them read an article about gentrification in Santa Ana and then asked ChatGPT to design a discussion-based activity using one of his favorite critical thinking frameworks.
ERIC TIMMONS: It selected this bridge activity for this article. Fourth Street is kind of like our main downtown area that is being gentrified.
REPORTER: Timmons shows me the notes from the discussion he had with his students.
ERIC TIMMONS: How do, uh, how does it affect the community? Why does it happen? One simile: Cultural changes in Santa Ana are like a rollercoaster because they are happening quickly, there are ups and downs and it can’t seem to stop them.
REPORTER: Timmons says he can also get it to align those discussions with California content standards.
ERIC TIMMONS: Now with ChatGPT, it knows what that is. It knows all of them, and it applies the correct ones for the assignment.
REPORTER: And Timmons says that lets him focus his energy on being present with his students.
Sounds of classroom interactions.
REPORTER: Unlike many teachers I’ve spoken to, Timmons encourages his students to use ChatGPT for parts of their filmmaking projects, particularly on tasks where they might get stuck or bogged down. I spoke to one of his students Alvin Gonzalez about this.
ALVIN GONZALEZ: I did a documentary about gentrification, and one of the challenges I come across when I'm, like, making a documentary is the questions. So I've never really excelled in English, so it's hard, like, coming up with different questions and writing them down. So I research who I'm gonna interview, and I use AI like ChatGBT to kind of like set up questions for me. So then from there it gives me a set of questions and then I do a little quality control. So I'm looking at the questions, thinking if they sound good, and if they don't, then I ask it to regenerate and I take the ones that I think are important and would help me.
REPORTER: Then, Alvin conducts the interview, films the speaker, records the audio, and edits all of that into his film. For another project, about youth advocacy around deportations, Alvin got ChatGPTs help on the film’s structure.
ALVIN GONZALEZ: So I had an immigration attorney who I had done an interview with, and then I had the, like the youth leader. So, and then I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with that. I didn't know where I wanted to lead, so I asked ChatGPT to give me some suggestions on what would be topics I could cover with the two interviews I had right now. And one of the topics they gave me was why youth advocacy is so important when it comes to this topic. And I, I thought it was an amazing topic and it would fit perfectly and it was something that I was still passionate about.
Sounds of classroom interactions.
REPORTER: Eric Timmons says he’s had conversations with his students about ways to use ChatGPT to do small parts of a bigger whole. He’s confident most of the ways they’ll use AI won’t harm their learning, but will help them get to the richer parts of their project.
ERIC TIMMONS: AI replaces the things you don't want to do, right? They don't like formatting a screenplay to Hollywood standards. Like they don't enjoy that. No one's like, “Oh, I love, like, you know, hitting the space bar this many times, or, you know, doing these things.” And honestly, most people are using expensive software to do that anyway. So my students love to make movies,so why would they replace that with AI? Because that's what they enjoy. They enjoy the editing process. They enjoy coming up with a story, right? They enjoy that.
REPORTER: Eric Timmons and Maria have different teaching styles, but they have some things in common. They’ve both been around a while, so adapting to a new challenge is familiar territory. They both design their classes so that students work independently, either on projects or math problems. And with those projects it’s hard for their students to use AI to fake that learning.
They both say that, at this early phase, they find the impact of generative AI manageable. At least for now.
Jesse Dukes’ reporting was funded by the Kapor Foundation. We had additional reporting from Holly McDede and Marnette Federis. You can hear more of Jesse’s reporting on this topic on the MIT Podcast The Homework Machine.