CDE Director Laura DeNardis advises young women on AI and school
CDE director Laura DeNardis was delighted to be contacted by Girls’ Life magazine for advice on how to use AI in school.
In answer to the question, “Is AI A-OK to use in school?” Girls’ Life magazine contextualizes AI’s use in school and lays out both the challenges and opportunities in its use.
Back in the dark ages (you know, when your parents were in school), kids had to spend hours in the library using books as resources for their papers and reports. Flash forward to your older cousin’s era—everyone had the internet to help with assignments. And now, for a lot of girls, using generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Gemini (Google’s version of ChatGPT) is the newest way to hack homework.
And why wouldn’t we use it? Instead of spending precious time flipping through textbooks or searching for terms online, we can simply ask AI a question and get answers, images, videos and even an outline for a specific topic.
But with this helpful tool comes a heaping load of controversy and questions: Should we really be relying on generative AI? Is it impacting how we learn? And then there’s the biggest debate of them all: Is using AI cheating?
The magazine intersperses amusing GIFs with interviews with students, statistics about the use of AI in schools, and examples of how best to use it (AI “can act as a personal study buddy”), as well as cautionary tales of what can happen when students rely on it too heavily. “Last fall, I kept using AI to calculate probability for me on my math homework,” one 17-year-old admits in the story. “I was so upset when I got a bunch of probability questions on the SAT later that year, and I had no clue how to solve them.”
“That’s why it’s still important to think for yourself,” the magazine cautions, quoting CDE’s DeNardis:
“More information is not more knowledge,” says Dr. Laura DeNardis, director of the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown University. “If you’re using an app to do the work for you, that’s not knowledge. In order to succeed, you need to actually learn.”