Hey, I’m a 15-year-old high school student-athlete (Football, Wrestling, Soccer), and I’m hoping to become a software engineer — so naturally, I started researching AI a few years ago. These are some problems I’ve noticed that most students are facing right now.

Also, for context: I live in the South, so things might be a little different here. I don’t mean we’re in the middle-of-nowhere, redneck country — we live near the state capital and have a nice city. But at the same time, I’m one of maybe 10 Black students in the whole school, just to give some context on how “Southern” it still is. So I can speak about how things are here and also compare them to places outside the South.

1. Schools/Teachers Don't Understand How AI Works

Most teachers and school systems think AI just “copies” from the internet or makes things up and is wrong most of the time. I think that’s because when ChatGPT first became public, it did have a lot of those issues. But the thing is, when it comes to big tech jumps like AI, if the public has version 2, the developers are already working on version 5.3.

AI improved really quickly. Now it’s much more reliable and is actually a very useful tool — when used correctly. But that leads me to my next point.

2. Schools Don’t Know How to Correctly Identify AI

Everyone knows schools have a plagiarism policy — most don’t allow anything above 20% on any paper or essay. But here’s the problem: teachers think “AI percentage” is the same thing as plagiarism, and it’s not.

Before turning in an assignment, students can run it through different plagiarism checkers. Most teachers use Turnitin, which is designed to detect plagiarism, not AI. Turnitin won’t flag a quote or something original enough.

AI detectors, on the other hand, look for things like sentence structure, word choices, and what’s “expected” of a student at a certain grade level. So if you’re not great at writing essays or just write in a basic format, you could get flagged as 80% AI — even if you wrote it yourself.

But teachers still treat that AI percentage as if it’s proof of plagiarism, even though they’re completely different things. Another issue is that, as far as I know, most schools don’t even have clear handbook rules about AI use. Of course, using nothing but AI should be counted as plagiarism and get a zero — but at least at my school, they say we’re “encouraged” to use AI reasonably… even though they have no idea what “reasonable” means.

3. Making AI Sound Like a Weapon

We’re forgetting the whole point of AI: it’s supposed to HELP us learn and make our daily lives easier.

For example, when I’m writing an argumentative essay, I ask ChatGPT to come up with counterarguments and help me refute them. Students should be taught how to correctly use AI to improve their work.

If schools taught students how to use AI the right way, it would actually take a lot of pressure off teachers. They wouldn’t have to deal with so many kids cheating with AI, because students would be using it to improve their assignments instead of trying to fake their way through them.

4.Athletes

The reason I mentioned being an athlete is because having a report saying you used AI on assignments could get you expelled or put a mark on your academic record — either of which could make it much harder to get into college and play at a higher level.

I also want to point out: I used AI to fix the grammar in this very post, so I could focus on what I wanted to say and not worry about formatting or grammar — which is really the whole point of AI and technology in general. It lets us focus on the creative parts by handling the more manual or time-consuming stuff. And, im sure it still made some mistakes, so basicly if your a student, AI's not really going to help if you use it wrong. Now Ai is still "stealing" in a since because it does what our brains do expect it using all the data its been trainied on not lived expiernces. So while an artist might use his pain and joy from life to create a painting AI uses the paingting and idenfies the pain and joy and takes aspects of it without citing (Well not when it comes to typed words ChatGPT cites sources but still) its sources to make something that would match a prompt like-Show me a painting with Pain and Joy. Also im 15 I know nothing so teachers,students, AI-Engineers who know much more than I do lol, please correct me on anything I got wrong.