The internet has come to a place where Jake Paul, a 6’1, 200 pound boxer, is teaching us how to do our makeup. The twist? It’s not actually him, but rather a deepfake AI video that was created using Jake Paul’s face of him doing his makeup. Although people laughed this off as a harmless joke, AI’s effects actually run much deeper than we realize.

Artificial Intelligence is integrating into our daily lives rapidly, whether it is generating content on social media, writing our emails for us, or solving a math problem. While the Jake Paul video might seem harmless, it is actually normalizing the use of AI in society and it dilutes the negative effects, making young people like students unaware of it’s harms when used in school.

Throughout history, humans have never stopped innovating. By the late 1970s, computers were entering homes, opening a wider set of opportunities that would drive us forward. Innovation is created to reduce the workload humans have, and will continue to do so, as seen in the 21st century.

So, what does it mean for a machine to produce the same output that humans are supposed to, and how do we measure what truly counts as skill or knowledge?

Copyleaks, the leader in content authentication, released a report of AI usage and found that 57% of students use generative AI for brainstorming ideas when starting a new project or assignment for school. Although projects are supposed to encourage students to use their creative liberty, they are turning to AI instead because to them, this is just another thing to get done.

AI is perfect for what the school system is rewarding.

At its core, school has prioritized and rewarded performance over any other factor, including learning. Students are conditioned to produce answers and write essays in a way that aligns with the grading system. The emphasis is rarely on how much students understand the concept, but rather on if they can show their understanding in that specific format. 

This isn’t new behavior. Long before AI, students have always relied on shortcuts in place of true learning. Whether that be answer keys or memorized formulas. AI only accelerates the process and helps students reduce their work in a more efficient manner.

Efficiency is crucial in a student’s daily life. For many high schoolers, their day starts at 6 and ends at eleven after sports and extracurriculars. Your practice ends at 9. You go home, eat dinner, take a shower and just realize you have an essay due at 11:59. 

This highlights that the core problem was never AI, but the system itself. While I acknowledge that it is the fault of the student for using the AI, the root problem is that students are set up in a system where they are expected to generate assignments that doesn’t actually encourage them to be creative, so they instead turn to AI to do this for them. 

It was a system that prioritized performance, and AI is the perfect tool for it.

Instead of villainizing AI and the students who use it, a more productive response is to rethink what really counts as learning. If education continues to prioritize what can be easily replicated by machines, who’s to say students shouldn’t use AI?

Students cannot be expected to break a pattern that has been occurring for generations. So let’s shift the perspective.

If we want to reduce the misuse of AI, the solution is not an outright ban, but rather taking a moment to rethink what we value in our school system and how we measure it. Research shows that intrinsic motivation is strongly linked to creativity and curiosity, so by rewarding curiosity and creativity over just correct answers and test scores, we can move forward in this dilemma. 

All we need is to see the real issue – and no, it’s definitely not a Jake Paul makeup tutorial.

Each opinion represented in The Panther Press is the view and voice of the writer. Opinions, as the selection and curation of content by the editors, do not represent the views of the entire Panther Press staff, the adviser, the school, or the administration.