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Amari Holt, 13, has a very busy schedule. She wakes up at 5:45 a.m. to get ready for school, which starts at 7 a.m. After classes, she has 15 minutes to change into costume for school play rehearsals. From there she’ll be running lines and learning stage blocking until about five or six in the evening, when she’ll get back home. After dinner, she still has about an hour and a half of homework to contend with. “It’s a little tough, but I like it,” the seventh grader tells Teen Vogue.
Headlines about Gen Z and Gen Alpha often describe these groups as incapable, indolent iPad kids, linking young people with declining attention spans, lackluster literacy skills, and inexorable technology addiction. Much of the blame is placed on the internet and its ever-looming presence in our daily lives, with a growing focus on the use of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT for homework and exams.
According to a Pew Research Center study released in January, more teenagers are using ChatGPT for their homework, with 26% of them age 13 to 17 reporting that they have used the AI service to help with their assignments this year, compared with 13% who used it two years ago. As traditional tech companies continue to roll out AI chatbots and summarization features on their platforms, Amari says, the use of AI has indeed become more common at her school. “Usually if kids don’t get the work done, they’ll probably use ChatGPT or they use their Snapchat AI,” she says. “I try to use it as little as possible, though.”
Amari is not the only one who feels that way. After all, the data shows that the majority of teenagers are still not using AI in their assignments (though, of course, self-reported studies are sometimes not entirely accurate). In conversations with Teen Vogue, students say that, despite the rising commonality of AI tools, they still have a desire to learn on their own — even if some of their peers are turning to shortcuts.
Sadie, 16, who asked to redact her surname for privacy, just committed to a college where she’ll play soccer. She’s also staunchly against using ChatGPT for schoolwork, partly because she doesn’t want to have to learn how to use it and partly because she doesn’t want to get in trouble for using it; mostly, though, she’s against using it because she feels she’d be cheating herself on the process of digesting new information. “I think that sometimes it’s a little bit unfair how people can get answers from it without really knowing what they’re reading,” Sadie explains. “They just use what they see and aren’t really processing it. I think that’s just the main reason why I’m against it.”
Amari thinks the characterization of Gen Alpha as dependent on shortcuts to do homework doesn’t represent the entire generation. “I feel like it’s true to a certain degree,” she says. “Students that don’t try would probably use AI, but students that want to try to get good grades wouldn’t. The students at my school who aren’t that committed to getting good grades would use that as a last-minute resource, an hour before the assignment is due.”
