AI in the Classroom: What Young People Think

Four students have found AI tools useful for their school learning, but they are concerned about the potential risks and becoming overly reliant on technology.

Justin Chan

Form 6 student, St. Paul’s Co-educational College

“AI provides us with a new way to learn.”

Generative AI has become very trendy nowadays and we find it useful in school learning. AI is very effective and powerful in providing information on a new topic I am interested in. For example, when we learn about matrices at school, those chatbots can provide certain basic knowledge and facts about matrix operation, which can help me prepare for lessons and understand the subject more thoroughly.

The way that AI provides humans with a new way to learn and think has freed us from repetitive and daunting tasks that we may find boring. Taking factory jobs as an example, some of the workstations are repetitive and may require no skill at all. Therefore, by replacing these tasks with AI and robots, humans will be able to upskill themselves.

However, the risk that comes with AI is the possible prevalence of misinformation, or even disinformation. AI is trained by humans by certain datasets and returns the desired result after learning from the given dataset. As a result, people who intend to exploit the power of AI could misuse AI by feeding the system with fake information. As the use of AI has already been very common, the widespread dissemination of false information may result in aggravating social cleavages.

In a nutshell, AI itself is a double-edged sword for the society. However, the careful and well-considered use of AI makes it an angel to us.

Tai Xi-wen

Form 3 student, HKMA David Li Kwok Po College

“I’ve been relying on computers more than ever.”

I have been using Poe, Dream AI, Suno, and Pika to assist me in creative writing, visual art and music creation for two years. I also partially relied on it for projects and debate research. As a member of the debate team, researching online is rather time-consuming and troublesome. I use Poe to gather all related information regarding specific wordings and phrases in our motion. I also ask the AI to provide me with the strongest arguments that our opposing team will make, so as to prepare brilliant rebuttals to their strong points. I sometimes spend one to two hours or more per day on Poe just to dig up the information regarding the debate.

I believe the future will be dominated by robots and AI. From my experience, AI is beneficial to us as students, offering more advantages than drawbacks. However, in a broader sense, it is difficult to predict its overall impact. I’ve noticed that I’ve been relying on computers more than ever, even before AI became prominent. My dad worries about my increasing screen time, and my doctor says my nearsightedness and astigmatism are worsening. Despite these concerns, I still see the potential for AI to become a problem in the future.

Dai Ji-feng, Harvey

Form 5 student, LKWFSL Lau Wong Fat Secondary School

“Losing the ability to think critically and independently makes us become AI’s puppets.”

In daily campus learning, the school rarely allows us to use Generative AI to assist our learning, but I use often use it to help solve some difficulties in learning. For example, I upload my finished English or Chinese article to ChatGPT, and it helps me identify and correct my grammar errors. I also ask the AI to generate a better version of my essay so that I can learn from different expressions and word choices to improve my writing.

I believe AI is just a tool, and whether it is good or bad depends on how we use it. Different people use AI in different ways. AI’s powerful and fast data processing capabilities can certainly improve society’s productivity and make our lives more convenient, but at the same time, some rely heavily on AI to help them complete their daily work and study. This is very dangerous because it will cause people to lose their independent and critical thinking ability, gradually diminishing their learning ability, and ultimately making us become 「AI’s puppets.」 The foreseeable consequence is that people think that everything can be done by AI and that they only need to enjoy themselves. This is very detrimental to the development of society and even mankind, and may even lead to the regression of culture.

As technology advances through time, the use of AI will be an indispensable part of human development in the future. However, we cannot rest on our laurels and stop using AI for fear of these consequences. This would only lead to Hong Kong falling further behind on the international stage. Therefore, I think the Hong Kong Education Bureau should take action to cultivate children with the correct values from an early age, teaching them to use AI to assist their learning and prevent them from becoming AI puppets.

Hayley Yuen

Form 3 student, Diocesan Girls』 School

“We need to set higher moral standards when using AI.”

To students, AI is an expectable and unavoidable part of our education, no matter what class we’re in. Our school has invested heavily in AI technologies, allowing us to access tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT in our projects. We listen to talks and watch videos about AI in school all the time, and I remember a day when all of my classes were centred around artificial intelligence.

Although I appreciate the school’s efforts to integrate AI technology in classes, I believe the most beneficial approach would be to teach us how to use AI mindfully. Firstly, AI learns values from data and experience, so it is likely to carry over discriminatory biases from historical data. Secondly, creative expression is innately humane, where art is created to instil a feeling, a thought, or an emotion of people. This is something artificial intelligence can never replicate or understand. Lastly, AI is trained on information without prior consent, making AI-generated content potentially unoriginal. As a society, we are becoming more progressive and are setting higher moral standards. We need to reflect these same standards when using AI in our daily lives. ■