Copley High School: Students tell us how AI is helping and hurting

Do the benefits of generative AI in education outweigh the harms? 

We sat down with Copley High School debate team members Anna and Charlotte, two sharp juniors who placed 5th at Ohio’s state finals, to hear how they built winning cases, adapted under pressure, and what they’re actually seeing in classrooms right now. 

From earlier cancer detection to drug repurposing for rare diseases, they explain how measurable outcomes like lives saved can carry a debate when compared to vague classroom promises. On the flip side, they unpack their con work on bias, Department of Education shifts, and AI-fueled misinformation. 

Equal opportunity surfaces as the toughest challenge. Will under-resourced students end up with AI tutors while wealthier peers keep human teachers, or will affluent districts race ahead with premium tools? We also get ground-level truth from inside the halls — teachers unevenly enforcing AI policies, students quietly using AI for assignments, and a widening gap between capability and oversight that could leave some graduates unprepared for in-person exams and real-world work. 

Throughout the episode, we compare AI to math calculators as tools that can raise the ceiling if we redesign learning to value process, reasoning, and oral defense. We also share concrete moves for educators, like scaffold drafts in class, placing an emphasis on sourcing and reflection, and using AI transparently for feedback and differentiation. 

If you’re an educator, parent, or student wondering how to navigate AI without losing the skills that matter, this is a candid and practical guide because it comes from real conversations about real classrooms. 

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Transcript

Meet the debaters and the resolution

Alex Kotran 0:04

Hi, I'm Alex. This is AIEDU Studios, Alex's Childhood Home Edition. I'm here with Anna and Charlotte from Capia High School, two juniors who recently competed in Ohio State finals for public forum debate. I was in speech and debate myself. I also did public forum. Um, but the reason we're having you on the show specifically is because the the topic for states was about artificial intelligence and education. Do you remember the exact resolution by chance? Because I don't.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

In the United States, the the harms of generative AI in education outweigh the benefits? Something like that. The benefits outweigh the harms, I think.

Alex Kotran 0:44

Yeah. Okay. So in short, is generative AI good or bad for education? Yeah. Out of curiosity, when you when you first encountered, when you first read that resolution, like did you have any hot takes? Was it something that you had even considered before?

SPEAKER_01 0:58

I mean, like, me personally, I haven't I at the time I didn't use much of Chat GPT or whatever to like, I don't know, cheat on things or like just in general help with my papers. But I did think, kind of going into the beginning, that like cheating was always like a thing. That because that's what you first think about like generative AI education. People using chat GPT to write essays. But like I always felt like people were gonna cheat anyway.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

That was kind of Yeah, I the only experience that I've had with AI, I don't think I actually ever used it until that point, was just knowing about Chat GPT and other generative AI models that people would use for homework. But that was it. So that was the first thing that came to mind, obviously, but I didn't have any other ideas.

Alex Kotran 1:46

Yeah, as with most, it's like cheating. Like that's that's where that's where your head went. Tell us about just sort of like what it what it's like. So you go in, where was the where were states hosted?

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Austin Town, Ohio, which is very much not central, but it was a nice high school. But we had six preliminary rounds, five on one Friday night, one on Saturday morning. And then after that, they would go into break rounds, a racket style tournament to, you know, uh weed people off.

SPEAKER_02 2:13

Yeah, so we actually had an extra ground because we were like one of the lower seeds to begin with, and then after that like runoff round, it was I think the top sixteen?

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Sixteen, yeah.

Alex Kotran 2:26

So how many times did you debate it total that day?

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Six prelims. I think it was nine rounds. Yeah.

Alex Kotran 2:34

Wow. Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

That was awful. And a round is about 45 minutes, so it was uh quite a long day.

How public forum works

Alex Kotran 2:42

And just to paint the picture for because I most most of our viewers and listeners probably have are not familiar with public forum debate. Um, yeah, what what is the setup?

SPEAKER_01 2:52

So it's a two-on-two style debate where you go into essentially like a middle school or high school classroom. It's you two, your your partner, and your opponents with typically one judge, and you debate about real-world like policy, international politics ideas. Uh, you have a pre-written case on both sides typically, and you will use evidence, go back and forth, debate until eventually the judge decides a winner.

SPEAKER_02 3:17

Yeah, and the judges are usually just parents of competitors, and then Anna's my partner for PF. Like, yeah, we have a pre-written case, and then there's like one person that's first speaker, they give the case. And then you have your person that does rebuttal, which is Anna, and you kind of like everything apart from the case that you give just to begin with is like impromptu off the cuff. You have you can have like pre-written ideas.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Yeah, and we have our like Chromebooks and computers with us to look up at evidence, look up new. Oh, that's new.

Alex Kotran 3:48

We didn't have computers. Yeah. We just have like stacks of paper. And you would and you would sometimes, when uh if if the opponent were making a really good point, you would like sort of furiously start writing as if it was like, oh, this there's obviously some rebuttal to this. It was a lot of like performance, uh performance art mixed in.

SPEAKER_02 4:04

I think the performance aspect is more so just when you're actually given your giving your speech, because there's a lot of people that use like all sorts of jargon and weird terms where they read really, really fast for no reason. But I think a lot of the times that actually throws off the judges because they're just random parents.

Alex Kotran 4:20

So And that's what makes it a bit unique is you're generally debating in front of someone who doesn't know much about the topic. Um, they're not experts, they're sort of lay, they're lay judges. Yeah. Um so sometimes jargon doesn't always win the day. You actually are and even sometimes facts don't necessarily win the day, sometimes you're making emotional arguments and sort of have to read the room.

SPEAKER_02 4:42

It's definitely a mix. And the idea of public forum is that like anybody can judge and you don't have to be qualified or know anything about the topic. So it's it's like 50% argument, but then also 50% how you present yourself.

Alex Kotran 4:56

Um oh, and then the other important detail is you have to argue both sides. And is it like actually 50-50? Do you flip a coin? I forget. How how do you how do you decide who which side you're gonna do?

Choosing sides and strategy

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Whoever gets to the room first gets to call a coin toss. Whoever wins the coin toss gets to choose whether they go first or second, or pro versus con on the argument. So typically you can have some leeway in which side you go to toward the when we once further we got into the tournament, I think we were choosing more neg con. No, no, no.

SPEAKER_02 5:28

We went we went pro. We were saying that AI and education is good, but it's not necessarily reflective of our own opinions. Just like our case was stronger.

Alex Kotran 5:36

Okay. So if you won the coin toss, you would rather you would choose pro as opposed to go choosing whether to go first or second. You felt good enough about the pro case. And then when you when you started doing your research, did you have like a sense of which side you'd want to I mean like which was stronger?

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Initially, after our sort of brainstorming session, it felt like con was gonna be way easier to argue and write, just because there's there were a lot of really strong, unique arguments to that. But eventually, I think as Charlotte was writing pro.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

Yeah, so what we do a lot of the time is we because usually there's like one side of the argument that's going to be easier. And so we research that, we write the case, but then we lean really hard into the opposite side because we figure that less people are going to be expecting us to argue that side, and also because I like overcompensate for the harder side, and then we end up going with that side.

Alex Kotran 6:31

Kind of right out of the gate, you assumed that um that pro was going to be harder to argue, and so you lean into it. So, what was the pro side?

Pro Case: AI’s medical impact

SPEAKER_02 6:40

For our case, we said that AI and education was good because of the possibilities of innovation in the medical sector. So we had one contention on like disease um diagnosis, where different AI models created by universities, so it kind of fits into education that way, are really good, like better than professionals at diagnosing certain cancers like lung cancer and pancreatic cancer, which are pretty hard to screen for. And then our second contention was creating new cures or reassigning drugs to different diseases. A lot of times there's not a lot of incentive to research cures for very rare diseases because there's not a lot of profit and not a lot of people have them. So they'll plug in like all sorts of diseases and then all sorts of drugs into like an algorithm, and then AI will pick drugs that could possibly treat this disease. And a lot of times it works.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

And like this is all being done by a lot of professors and medical students, just like in their college education or in graduate school, which is sort of how we connected it to education in that regard. It's it's like because when you're trying to make an argument that a lot of people don't expect, you sometimes gotta stretch the definitions out. So Yeah.

Alex Kotran 7:56

And the definition, I mean, in education is broad enough. It didn't it was it wasn't specifically K-12 or um did you have any opponents who were like, uh, that's sort of not germane.

SPEAKER_02 8:06

I mean, medicine people tried, but I think when you have a bunch of parent judges and you're they're trying to argue that like university research is an education, but they don't have a definition of education, and we do, then it's not not the best, you know? It looks like you just don't have a response for what we're bringing up.

Alex Kotran 8:23

Right. If you're gonna argue on sort on semantics, you have to have a really, really strong case, or else it just looks like you don't have a response from the pro side. Did you try had you tried others? Or did you just kind of right out of the gate, you were like, that's gonna be our strategy?

SPEAKER_02 8:37

I think this was more like a right out of the gate sort of thing because I was doing some research into it. And the more research I did, the more I realized how not prevalent these are, but how like they have a really strong possibility to produce a lot of possi or positive change. And they're being implemented now currently. And all of the models that I had researched had some connection to a university, and I didn't think that anybody else was going to do it. And nobody else did. Like this was only us that went for the medical sector.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

And like the reason why it was so beneficial is because in public forum, a lot of like deciding who wins is based on like weighing impact, so like giving numbers and a lot of things in education, you can't really like say like this many people will be educated by AI, this many teachers will be fired or whatever. So you have we can use lives. We can use like actual numbers of years being saved and by people lives being saved, which is a lot more impactful when compared to a lot of a lot of other things.

Alex Kotran 9:37

Um so so tell me about the con your con case.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

Our con case we didn't use very much just because people were calling us out for how we use the definition of education and the judges were believing them. And so I think it was a good case, but I just don't think that it would have won us many rounds if we leaned into it. So what we did was two contentions, and then the first one was about how AI is being used to cut down the Department of Education with Doge. And then we went into the impacts that would have on disabled kids, especially with the biases that generative AI has against disabled people.

Definitions Battle: What is education?

SPEAKER_01 10:17

And our second contention was talking about how misinformation is education, or how how news is education, and then misinformation in the news and like the media is being like infinitely more powerful with AI, with making deep, deep fakes, or literally m we found something make making entirely fake news websites run entirely by AI. And like not this is a harmful to the mass media, but also like our children, people in schools and all that stuff.

Alex Kotran 10:53

And your opponents would their response was the media isn't education, or yeah, they would just try to argue mostly definitions.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

Mostly they were saying that our department of education case wasn't good because we weren't actually educating anyone. It was just the department of education, which I mean, if you're gonna argue that the department of education isn't doesn't fall under education, that's kind of silly. But I could see that a lot of judges were believing them just in like the way that they had their facial expressions and everything. And it was just so tiring to be in a definitions debate the entire time rather than actually talking about anything of substance. So we switched over to a pro for most of our case, most of the rest of the rounds.

Alex Kotran 11:34

And it's interesting because it also suggests that your opponents really didn't have a good way of countering it besides the definition.

SPEAKER_02 11:41

Yeah. It's definitely something that only we were talking about. Somebody else tried to do misinformation, but they didn't connect it to education at all. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Their attempt at misinformation was like they didn't really specify. They just said AI is in schools. AI causes misinformation, therefore it's bad. But they didn't specify how much of this misinformation is in schools, where it's in schools.

SPEAKER_02 12:07

When I pressed them on it, they only said that misinformation, if it ha is happening in like the news and the general public, then it must also be happening in schools. But that's kind of I don't think that's a very strong point because schools are a lot different than the general public. They're a lot more secluded and there's a lot more restrictions on the things that you can see. So we we push them on that. But I think they could have made a a better argument if they had gone with if you if education is teaching somebody something, then like all news media is education.

Alex Kotran 12:39

Yeah, because there's not, I don't know that AI is like causing misinformation in schools. You'd you'd you'd have to sort of extend it to like hallucinating and the fact that you know AI tools are sort of inherently can't fully be controlled. So there's I think there's a way to do it, but yeah, definitely harder than just defining misinformation or defining media as education.

SPEAKER_03 12:58

Yeah.

Con Case: AI bias and misinformation

Alex Kotran 12:58

So if you mostly were able to go pro, that means your opponents were generally because you're roughly 50-50, you know, winning or losing the the coin flip. So opponents were gravitating towards con. Like that's what they wanted to argue. Yeah. So nine rounds total. Nine rounds. You placed fifth? Fifth. Yep. Which is a big deal. Like, like there's a lot. I mean, like how many, how many debates? I mean, you go to every every other month, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Or every month or every week we go to a tournament, every month we change topics. It's there's and this is in the entire state, so like only a select peop few people were even able to make it to state finals. And out of those people, we got fifth.

SPEAKER_02 13:37

And as as juniors from like a school that doesn't actually have a speech and debate class, we were pretty proud of ourselves.

Alex Kotran 13:44

Yeah, because those schools have a literally class. Every day you were going and you're working on your case. You have a teacher that's working with you, meeting after school with with Chris DeLoger, who um was it's it was interesting. He was like my biggest um rival when that when I was in public forum debate. I forget what school he was in, but I remember that this it would always always, you know, we would just like inevitably clash. And, you know, I think we we probably went, I'd be curious to his take on this. I think we probably were 50-50 in terms of um, you know, who would win when we would go up against one another. He probably would not say that.

SPEAKER_02 14:20

I think I think he would say that he won, but yeah, I don't have the I don't have the stats on that.

Alex Kotran 14:25

Um he always he always had the most like he would always have some like really interesting debate, like like arguments to pull out of his back pocket. That's very cool that so he's he's your debate coach. Um and so you placed fifth, which means out of nine rounds, how many did you win?

SPEAKER_02 14:39

I think we lost two preliminary rounds. So we just made it to the cutoff, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:43

Yeah, and then we lost one. So at the end six out of nine, we won.

SPEAKER_02 14:47

Yeah, yeah.

Alex Kotran 14:49

So what was the what was the strongest con argument?

SPEAKER_02 14:53

I think the one that we heard the most, and the one that I remember the best, was talking about how AI is going to increase like um inequality in education or the education gap, where lower income students or minority students, people that are on the margins of society, are going to be given AI tools and AI teachers and things like that. And then the actual the the rich kids or maybe the white kids in these nicer schools are going to be given actual hands-on learning with teachers and in-person, um, like in-person resources. And then they would talk about the impacts that AI has on kids, whether that be socially or with the misinformation thing, and then they'd like spin it off to say, like, we're we're hurting the people that are already being hurt the most. And that's kind of the the way that we counter that was talking about how AI has the possibility to decrease the education gap if used properly. But what they would say in response is that it becomes like a temporary solution where you can implement an AI robot instead of a teacher. But then if that's cheaper, it's going to become permanent. And that's not something that we want to see happen for lower income kids. It's not the right solution.

Equity and the digital divide

SPEAKER_01 16:07

But then uh some people would actually do the complete opposite of that, where they would say that the wealthier school districts or the lighter school districts would get access to AI because they just said AI was more expensive to implement. And so then it would further the technology gap where the richer uh districts are obviously getting all these technologies like what happened with the internet, and then the poorer districts are left behind. So even if AI is ultimately good in education, it's bad because it's still widening that gap and it's still causing a digital divide.

Alex Kotran 16:40

Yeah, it's interesting because we're, you know, I've just attended a bunch of conferences where that's the discussion. In fact, I think mostly like right now in education, most folks are really talking about the potential for AI to improve teaching and learning. Um, but there are folks, you know, myself included, who have just, and I think that's one of the things we talked about, right? Is the idea that if you can't just throw lots of AI at education gaps and assume that that's going to to solve them because there's like that world where you have a bunch of kids just sitting in classrooms getting all the AI and it's like they're not they're not getting the the the full dynamic, you know, human-centered experience um that you know wealthier or just more advantaged kids get. Just like walk me through, like when you encounter that, did you just go for the opposite? So if they would if they argued AI was, you know, gonna exacerbate you know, gaps because it was gonna be overused, you would argue that it could be better and then the vice versa.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

So what we did when they brought up like it's going to worsen the education gap because lower income students are going to get the AI resources. We talked about how if it's implemented properly, it can actually help teachers to plan lessons or help administration administrative costs, and it's not going to be replacing teachers as much as it's going to be eliminating costs in and like time constraints in other areas. And so it could possibly help this education gap. And we had a few cards on that. So we just show them that because it's kind of hard to argue with like an actual piece of evidence. They can argue with our logic, but we had we had a few sources for that.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Yeah, essentially we would just ask them, all right, prove it. Where is this happening? Like how it are like are is AI replacing these teachers? Is this actually happening now? Or because most of the time they it was just sort of they were just making a search. It's like theoretical. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

And then the one team that did the opposite, where it was like, rich kids are gonna get AI and everybody else is going to get these lesser resources. I think we argued that, I mean, this is this is a systemic issue, more so than AI's problem, where you haven't proven that AI is causing any harms. You're just proving that people are gonna get it in an unequal fashion, which is not really resolutional, because we're talking about the causes, there, the harms that AI specifically causes, not the not the harms that the unequal education system causes.

Alex Kotran 19:06

Oh, I really like that. Yeah, because basically it's not just AI that's gonna be exacerbating those differences. It also access to transportation and broadband.

SPEAKER_02 19:16

AI is um a symptom of a larger issue, I think, rather than the actual issue. It has the possibility to make that issue worse, but putting it into certain schools or not in this context is not going to actually fix the the thing that is causing these this um education inequality.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

And like with their argument, they're sort of implying that AI is making the actual education of those maybe richer districts better. It's somehow doing good in the school itself, which we felt sort of fell into our argument with furthering that sort of definition Charlotte just gave.

Alex Kotran 19:56

So in the instances where you did lose, do you have a sense of like what what drove that? Like what or was it was it just like trouble convincing the judge or I remember one round that we lost.

SPEAKER_02 20:07

It was one of the earlier ones, a prelim, and we went con, and I think we lost because our definition of education the judge didn't like because we were talking about the Department of Education. The opponents were saying that's not actually educating somebody. And so we just like that took up a lot of the round, and I don't think our judge appreciated that very much, and so he voted for our opponents.

Alex Kotran 20:31

During the tournament, do you actually get any of the feedback from the judges, or do you have to wait until the end? So you have no sense of like why you won or lost.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

You just get the We didn't get it until after it was already done the next day. But we sort of I mean, you obviously kind of have some sense of if you like destroyed them or not, or like how how good you did. But it a lot of these, because it was obviously finals, it was a a coin flip a lot of the time.

SPEAKER_02 20:57

Yeah, like it's it's it's a toss-up when you get go against like better opponents, especially in states. But the actual like official feedback is the day after.

Alex Kotran 21:05

Like, I don't know who to blame if you get caught into this definition. It's just up to the judge at that point. Yeah, so you're kind of you're so you're seeing the judge's face and it's and you're you sort of have to make a gut a just a call on like this this could be going bad for my opponents, but it's also 50-50. We don't really have any evidence, we have less control, so let's sort of pivot to um an area where we have more evidence.

SPEAKER_02 21:29

We we make a lot of generalizations based on like the stickers on their computer and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

We have to I think that judge in particular was one of the coaches. I think he was a perry coach or something that clearly knew what he was talking about. He was very silent trying to keep a masked face.

Alex Kotran 21:46

Did you like any weird arguments that just you didn't expect or like left field?

SPEAKER_01 21:52

In this one team. There was hunting in round six, I think. It was they were arguing They were on con. We were on pro. Yes. Yes. And they were arguing, I think it stemmed off of chat bots where students are interacting with AI over actual people. This is like declining their mental health.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

And ultimately the weird, it's like it sounds like, okay, you want me to go through like the actual train of bots they had? It was so stretched. They said that children are interacting with chatbots and they feel compelled to keep talking to these chatbots and they feel start to like form a bond with them. But that leads them to get less socialization with actual people, which causes them to all become depressed. And that will cause them to all commit suicide. And then their ultimate number was like nine million people. And we were like, there's what?

Alex Kotran 22:52

But but how's that connected to education?

SPEAKER_02 22:54

That's what we said.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

But also like their impacts were so stretch. Yeah, I think I ultimately asked, and their reasoning was kids will use chat GPT to like cheat on homework or whatever. And then they'll keep, they'll see, hey, chat GPT is good, they'll keep going, and then eventually it'll move to their home life.

SPEAKER_02 23:11

And then they feel compelled to keep using it and like form a social bond with it.

Alex Kotran 23:15

So education is almost like the um the the the vector, the transmission vector for the much bigger harm. So they're like education's actually just not really the story. The story is all these kids are gonna commit suicide.

SPEAKER_02 23:27

Yeah, but but I don't I think they didn't argue it very well. And I don't think that education was like the main focus. What they're I think what they were going for when they were making this case was how do we get the biggest number possible? And they just kind of found a way to work back from that.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

Because nine million kids is half of all American high schoolers, which you know that's kind of ridiculous. I think I looked up that card afterward and it said maybe this many people per year have suicidal thoughts. Nothing related to AI or chatbots or was that even in the US or was it globally?

SPEAKER_02 24:02

I I don't remember. I think it was might have been globally. I don't know. It was really stretched.

Alex Kotran 24:06

It was And the resolution was in the US, yeah. Um I mean, I think the chatbot argument could be really powerful. I think it could have been, but you but you you'd still get caught up in the this this definition.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

Yeah, because like are students talking to their AI boyfriend at school, or like there there definitely have been like chatbots that have done bad things.

SPEAKER_02 24:31

Like I I was researching um the chatbot argument when I was writing my case for Khan, and there was like apparently this one like character AI of Billy Eilish who told the kid to go kill his parents or something like that. And so they sued the company. Something of that sort. Um and so yeah, there's definitely a problem, but it's just kind of hard to connect that to education because it seems like something that would be limited in schools, like smartphone usage or something, you know. Nope, because it doesn't really have an educational quality.

Alex Kotran 25:05

And so you don't because I would have, I wouldn't have even tried to connect it to school specifically. I would just say like the t the the ways that you you are educated is you're also educated about how to operate, you know, as a human and in sort of social environments. And, you know, part of everybody's education is stuff that happens outside of school. It's things like social interactions and friendships and asking someone to prom. But it sounds like that might have actually been a little bit difficult to convince judges of because people were being a little bit more pedantic about this.

SPEAKER_02 25:37

Yeah, I think if you could have like a good definition of education, that could be a strong argument. But just the way that they did it was I I don't think that was the correct way to do it.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

Because like obviously we talked about, oh, what's your first thought is most people think cheating on papers. That's the judge's first thought, too. So the further you get away from that kind of baseline thought of what AI is in education, the less convincing your argument is at some point.

Alex Kotran 26:02

Any like really effective creative arguments that you didn't expect?

SPEAKER_02 26:08

Trying to remember what the arguments were that we heard.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

This was a while ago. Yeah, I think I mean the first round was the job yet.

SPEAKER_02 26:16

That wasn't like Yeah, we heard about brain drain a little bit, where um they said that it AI was going to help the brain drain by like educating people in more rural areas and giving them more job opportunities. They didn't connect it very well to like how many jobs would actually be created. And you could definitely argue that it's going to take away jobs from people, but there was You can definitely argue that you could yeah, you could you could I think have it like a creative argument for AI if you went in that direction. I don't think they did, but and then we also heard one about climate change which was interesting. I think like they might have been on to something. They were talking about how like many carbon emissions, GPT three or something like that, emitted, and it was a very high number.

Alex Kotran 27:05

It is a it is a high number. I mean, that's definitely that's what there's there's no doubt a a huge con argument, sort of in terms of is AI good or bad for society. But I'm trying to think about okay, so to connect it to education, I guess was it just that like climate change is going to be so catastrophic, it's gonna be harder to learn if there are floods.

What debate club taught them about AI

SPEAKER_01 27:25

The problem was they didn't connect it to education. The point was that using AI and train, especially training AI models, obviously takes up a lot of water and a lot puts a lot of carbon into the air. And they used GPT-3 as an example, which kind of wasn't the best example because it's specifically we've gotten better since then. But they essentially said that with that and with students would be using AI every day in schools, constantly putting in inputs, would eventually output some level of carbon, except they couldn't really specify, which sort of is where they lost.

SPEAKER_02 27:59

Like you could go in that direction, but they didn't quantify how what like what percentage of this would be a result of education or what the increase in AI usage in education would be. So you could say, like, you know, this many people die of carbon emissions and this many emissions were made by G um GPT-3, but you can't actually connect it directly to education because we don't know what percent of that is caused by education or would be.

Alex Kotran 28:22

I mean, I think that I mean, I I think that could have been a powerful argument because there's actually there's some there's some stats that show uh the usage of Chat GPT uh dropping, at least initially. I don't know if it's still the case in 24. Um, but in 2023, I think it was like a big drop between like May and June. Um, and then a big increase all of a sudden in uh like August, September. I don't know how specific you'd have to be for a judge to feel like you could actually make the connection, but it's like, you know, like kid like like students make up yeah, clearly something's happening here. Um yeah, that and so nobody made like the existential risk. Like AI is going to basically just kill us all, and and putting in education is just gonna like you know, least in that.

SPEAKER_02 29:03

That was that was actually, I think, the LD topic. It was about whether reducing general AI was moral, something like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

Something with general A rally there was one other debater that went to states in LD, uh, I uh she's a senior, but we convinced her to make her argument AI is going to kill just kill us all. But the twist is that she argued that that was a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 29:26

Well, kind of. Mr. DeLogier didn't like that idea very much, but he he like he modified it so it was like, well, we're gonna leave this legacy behind, and if we're all gonna die anyways, then might as well have AI be like the yeah, what's left. So we should produce it now. I wanted to I I wanted her to argue that it's moral for all humans to die because she it's her senior year, last debate ever, you know? But she didn't want to do that.

Alex Kotran 29:53

Wow. So so the argument went, we're all gonna human humanity is doomed one way or another, whether it's the sun, you know, blowing up or Yeah, like essentially Fermi's paradox, the great filter. Yeah. And so we'd be better off at least having some like legacy that sort of continues forward our ability to have an imprint on the universe and potentially even maybe we're also uploaded.

SPEAKER_03 30:16

Yeah.

Alex Kotran 30:17

Yeah, that's a classic sort of like the difference between LD and public forum. Public forum is very just like stuff that you would read in the news, very yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Evidence LD is more philosophical and like, oh, what if and all that fun stuff.

Alex Kotran 30:31

Pre- and post going through this, I mean, has your perspective on AI changed?

Future paths, colleges, and career talk

SPEAKER_02 30:36

I didn't know about the AI in the medical sector before. So it's definitely very interesting, and I think it could have a lot of positive uses. What I've learned, I think, most of all, is that when you're talking about AI, you have to be very specific what AI you're talking about, because AI can like give you your Netflix recommendations or guide missiles for the US Army. And so people often generalize AI, and even within like one group of AI, like generative AI, which is what we were talking about, you have to be specific where it's being used and for what purpose. So, like, I'm against Chat GPT being used to write essays, and I think that's gonna worsen a lot of people's reading scores and like comprehension and ability to write. And however, I think that if we created AI models to maybe find cures for diseases that are not being researched, that could really help people.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

Yeah, and like one thing I realized just going through the entire term is how much just we don't know what will happen. It's like we're at like a crux, and like AI could go this way, AI could go that way, it could be used this, but like we have so little evidence, but it could easily go any of those ways.

SPEAKER_02 31:44

Yeah, like researching this, I felt like I realized I am standing on the the like the brink of a technological revolution. Like this is the new internet, this is the new, I don't know what was before that, telegraphs. But like this is yeah, this is the the big thing that like we are going to live through and we'll be telling our kids, well, when I was a kid, AI was just coming out, or we didn't have this, we didn't have that. So like what like what Anna said, you know, where are we gonna go from now? Where are we gonna go from here? Because I think a lot of people are not talking about the direction that AI is going, just talking about what it's doing right now.

Alex Kotran 32:20

Yeah, if you once you start to zoom out, and I think that's what's interesting about this resolution is it forced you to actually take this bigger picture. Getting too caught up in cheating specifically, maybe it feels like, you know, small beans compared to um, you know, the other implications. I I'm curious if as you have you changed your thinking about your career pathways at all.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

I mean, I think I was, you know, before thinking about the medical sector, but still I am, but like I'm slightly more excited about it now because like obviously you our pro case was about innovation in the medical sector in universities. And I feel like it might open it just up more opportunities, especially just like in being able to research, in being able to uh sort of mitigate those uh minor tests, and we can able to we're able to like focus more on the big picture, like as humans.

SPEAKER_02 33:10

Yeah, I I feel the same way as Anna. I'm very interested in science and possibly the medical sector. And I'm not a very technological person, but if this is gonna be like just the new Google, then it's something we're thinking about. And you know, I wonder like in 10 years, what is it going to look like in the medical sector or in the research field? You know, how are we going to find diseases or even like like um put genomes into databases, things like that? You know, it how is AI going to factor in?

Alex Kotran 33:41

Does AI come up? I mean, when you're thinking about when you're going through the process of deciding, I mean you're juniors right now, and so have you applied to college yet? Remind me when that happens. Is that like the summer you start?

SPEAKER_01 33:52

Uh usually like August, September. But I've gone on a bunch of college visits. We actually went on one two days ago. We went down to OSU.

Alex Kotran 34:00

Oh nice.

SPEAKER_01 34:00

And I liked it. I thought it was good.

SPEAKER_02 34:03

But I think the actual application starts like August through fall next year.

Classroom Reality: How students use AI

Alex Kotran 34:09

How was Cobley High School trying to inform your decisions? I mean, is there a a teacher or like a counselor that will like come in and sort of talk about here's how you know career paths are changing. I mean, is there any conversation about the fact that there are these new technologies and they're kind of potentially going to change, you know, the the types of degrees or credentials or skills that you might need to be successful?

SPEAKER_02 34:33

Well, kind of like we have counselors, but I think the only thing that they talked about with we also had a career fair a while ago, but I think the only thing that they talked about with AI was when they had you come in and talk about it, which to their credit, they did that. But that was that was really it. You know, most people when they think of AI, it's still just chat GPT and cheating and not how how it's going to impact the workforce, even though people know it is going to.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

And I think actually in my financial literacy class, we uh he talks, my teacher talks about yes, financial literacy, but also we're in a unit where we're talking about college and talking about jobs. So he obviously is talking about choosing your career and how like he mentioned a little bit how AI could change it or how like new technology in general might change it, um, especially in the like computer field.

Alex Kotran 35:22

So people aren't talking about the future of work.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

Not really.

Alex Kotran 35:25

Like it like had that phrase actually come out of curiosity?

SPEAKER_02 35:29

No, people when it comes to AI, they just say it's going to take away jobs mostly, but they don't really specify when or like how fast or what jobs. I that's just the only thing that I've heard. It's going to take away jobs.

Alex Kotran 35:43

And so you had the benefit of having gone through speech and debate and spending a lot spending a lot of time learning about you know AI and education. But so it'd be accurate to say like your friends who are also making the same decisions about where to go to school or what to do after they graduate, even if it's not, you know, a four-year degree. Maybe teachers aren't or or counselors are bringing it up. Like, are are kids talking about it? Is this like something on TikTok?

SPEAKER_02 36:05

I think in my personal experience, it's just like I use this AI to do my math homework or write my English essay mostly. That's that's really the extent of it.

SPEAKER_01 36:15

We actually um the closer the only AI mostly I've seen actually in class, other than what I just mentioned, is what our ironically, when we were in our government class and our we were working on a big project and we had to do a bunch of like a list of tasks. I was assigned one and I asked my teacher, hey, can I just use Chat GPT for this? And she said, Yeah, I'm technically supposed to encourage you to use AI in like work or like your education. So yeah, go for it. And then I just use ChatGPT to do it. I showed it to her and she's like, wow, that's pretty good. And then I submitted it.

SPEAKER_02 36:46

Oh, you know what? In my art class, actually, um, my teacher is using Chat GPT to give us feedback on our art. So she'll take a picture of our art piece and put it into Chat GPT and say, How can I improve this? And then it will spit out a bunch of results. Usually they're pretty accurate, I would say.

Skills lost, skills gained, and AI detectors

Alex Kotran 37:02

Well, that's actually amazing. I've never I've never seen that use case using, I guess, because now it has sort of like the vision capabilities and like actually create art as well. It is really well to me that there's there's not because I guess from the the space that I operate in, which is very adjacent, right? K-12 education, but from the standpoint of you know, education leaders and all the foundations and organizations that are really obsessed with how do we help kids like you and your peers get onto pathways that are successful. In the spaces that I'm in, it is it is like a certainty. They're like jobs are going to change dramatically. There's going to be lots of disruption. AI is going to, you know, create new winners and new losers. And the key thing is that we need to make sure that students have, you know, the skills and knowledge to be able to make good decisions about their career pathways, to have this the competencies and knowledge they need to thrive, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And even then, like the World Economic Forum has, I think it's called like the Future of Work Commission or some sort of you know entity that's literally talking about the future of work, you know, every single day. There's blog posts, there's, I think there's probably entire blogs just called like the future of work. There seems to be some weird dissonance that we're not creating that conversation in with the future workers who are and like you're literally like months away from making decisions about college. I think, by the way, health sciences, medicine, um good. That's a good good pathway to be on. Maybe not as many doctors that are just doing what doctors today do. But um, as you as you pointed out, there's just gonna be so many interesting ways to actually use AI to sort of enhance and improve health healthcare. I mean, that and maybe like, you know, becoming a plumber is probably among the very few, like truly, you know, reliable pathways where we haven't we know enough to to feel confident.

SPEAKER_02 38:47

Um I think I think the reason why we're not talking about it so much in my school is because like boomers were the generation that doesn't know how to use like a smartphone. And I think maybe our teachers are in the generation that's gonna be like that with AI because it's just it wasn't like a part of when they were growing up or when they were young adults. We were the generation with the iPhone in our hand when we were born. But now we're also gonna be the generation that has AI in our workforce. And because they don't have it in their workforce, it doesn't seem as much of an issue to them as it will be to us eventually.

Alex Kotran 39:21

Aaron Powell Cause your assumption is that the the students at Captain High School are probably more experienced with using AI than the teachers.

SPEAKER_01 39:29

I yeah, actually uh one once again, another example in financial literacy, he we had like just a little fun thing, like come up with the weirdest scholarship you can find. I saw at least 10 people open their phone and open chat GPT, literally just ask the question, scroll down and pick an answer.

Alex Kotran 39:44

And did the teacher realize that was happening? Oh no, he doesn't care. But you know.

SPEAKER_02 39:48

I think a lot of teachers just don't realize that it's happening at all. Especially the older ones or people that aren't like English teachers definitely know what's what's going on. But like, for example, math teachers don't know that you can take a picture of your homework and probably have Chat GPT solve it. I'm guessing.

SPEAKER_01 40:05

Yeah, there are AI math that math math AIs that'll just literally step by step, here's how to solve this, and then you just copy it down.

Alex Kotran 40:12

Yeah, you're sort of in this golden era of like arbitrage, like basically this period where um the teachers haven't really caught up to the capabilities. And you know, future classes at Copley will will pine for the days when the teachers were not as caught up and smart.

SPEAKER_02 40:31

I I definitely see like the the restrictions on AI are lagging far behind AI's capabilities.

Alex Kotran 40:37

And and there's some people that again that get the you know, in our space who are like, oh, teachers they they just need to get past this idea of AI is cheating. You know, we need to empower students to use AI and harness it. And what I'm hearing from you is like, yeah, but they're also actually literally just cheating. Like they're not, they're not using it to do more creative stuff, they're just like pulling out their phones, getting like a quick answer.

SPEAKER_02 41:01

Well, it's it's kind of nuanced because like, for example, when I was in middle school, Grammarly was the big new thing and everybody was using Grammarly, which is just a spell check. And now I know a lot of people that just can't spell because Grammarly was in their life from that young age. And I think a lot of time I think that's gonna be the case for the middle schoolers nowadays when they have Chat GPT and they can write their essays. They just won't be able to write on their own anymore. And, you know, kids have always been cheating. So the problem of why they cheat is not different now. But the difference with AI is that it has the capability to not just give you pointers on an essay or you're not just plagiarizing someone else's essay. It writes a completely original essay for you, specifically about what you want. You can input anything in there and it will spit it out in a matter of seconds. It's something that we've never seen before.

AI advice for educators

SPEAKER_01 41:52

Yeah, but also going back to the debate, uh we I during my research on rebuttals against that sort of argument, I actually found something really cool where OpenAI has discovered a way uh to essentially they put like a tag on like every anything written by ChatGPT, and they've developed like an actual like 90-some percent way like certainty way to identify anything that was written by Chat GPT better than what obviously previously was. And California ha has actually introduced a bill to mandate that they actually put this in their algorithm and to mandate this happens so to prevent cheating in schools and to prevent all these negative stuff that we're talking about.

Alex Kotran 42:38

Yeah, like um like watermarks of some kind.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

Yeah.

Alex Kotran 42:42

It's really hard in text. I mean, with it with images, it's much easier. So you can like sort of like create these sort of image like watermarks for like AI generated images. Yeah, that I mean there's a big, there is a a big debate, if you will, about this. There's a challenge with watermarks is you're you're kind of relying on the ability of deterrence to always outpace you know, people's ability to sort of just like get around it. And you know, I don't I I don't know if that's a good bet. I don't know if it's a good bet that there will never be, you know, some freely available model that's able to get around the uh the detectors. And if teachers, instead of trying to figure out how do we how do we rethink the way that we create assignments so that it's harder for students to just use AI purely as a shortcut, they're not gonna build those skills. I think there's actually gonna be this class of students in that gray area right where for where we're in right now, where they're gonna be getting good grades, they're gonna be passing, you know, high school, they're gonna be passing classes in college, and they're just not gonna be like ready. They're gonna, they're gonna be, you know, either getting into college and like starting to, you know, at some point you're you can't just chat GPT your way through a class. And I've actually heard this. I've heard the um it was stats or something. And it's like, yeah, everybody keeps failing their stats tests because they were using AI, and then like eventually you have to do like a right, like, you know, sit. Yeah, test in class and they're just bombing it.

SPEAKER_02 44:02

Yeah. I think that's kind of scary knowing that like the next generation of architects and nurses and things like that are being are using AI to do their work and then they're going to go onto the job force because we ha don't have a lot of restrictions on it right now.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

Yeah, but at some point you do have to think about it like the way we're talking about earlier. Like in the debate rounds, we use this analogy of lot a lot of AI is just like a tool. It's like the calculator where, you know, obviously at first people were saying, oh, kids are gonna lose their math skills, whatever, they're not gonna know how to do basic multiplication. But ultimately, it kind of allowed a higher level math courses to be much easier because you could just punch in the easy stuff to learn the harder stuff. And eventually I think we will have to transition to that point with AI, even if we aren't there right now.

SPEAKER_02 44:48

Yeah, ultimately there will be a loss of skills. That's inevitable. But it's it's more about what are the new things that we can do now that we have this tool in our pockets.

Alex Kotran 44:58

You're really speaking about this more eloquently than than a lot of the people that are self-described experts in AI and education. It's fascinating. Because that tension of loss of skills, like handwriting, spelling is a great example, handwriting is another example. So there are certain skills that you say, well, like yes, it it is a shame that we don't sit down and like have perfect penmanship. Um I think it was like the the amount of pages that a student writes in like high school today is like let's say five pages of prose per week in terms of like content, like like in this case, typed, like usually today. Um in the 1980s, it was like half a page. And so we're actually creating more content. We're actually getting the chance to write more because of computers and the keyboard. And on balance, it's probably better to have a chance to write more than to necessarily have good penmanship and spelling doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Writing, though, if the if we get to a place where it's like, well, now people just don't really have the ability to like come up with a thought on their own, because like writing is sort of thinking. Like I'd be I'd I'd be I don't even think I have to ask. My guess is that ChatGPT wasn't actually terribly helpful for um for debate. I mean, I don't know if you use it. I mean, do you use it at all to uh summarize things?

SPEAKER_01 46:08

No, I think they did officially put out something that's like, please don't write cases with AI.

SPEAKER_02 46:13

I'm I asked it to one time, not for this one, for like a an older one. I was like, can you write a PF case about this topic? And it was terrible. So I went into it again.

SPEAKER_01 46:23

I think actually we we were doing our initial brainstorming session for um Littles, I think, the state qualifying. We asked Grok. Yeah, we did ask Groc. The ex Twitter AI. And he actually, it wasn't terrible ideas. They were stuff that we already came up with, though. Yeah.

Alex Kotran 46:40

My guess is it would probably have created a really coherent case. But the problem is when you're competing, like just having like something that sounds right isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 46:51

It doesn't take into account like the the oral component of you know having to do it in this amount of time, or it like it can't actually list sources and link them correctly. So but there's like a lot of people I think that are arguing that AI right now, like especially with art AI or written AI, you can tell it's AI. But I like there will be a time in the future when you can't. So I it's just like I know this is kind of unrelated, but I think that's one of the major arguments that people that are against AI say is like, you can tell it's AI, it's never going to reach the capabilities that a human has, but it will eventually. It's just not there right now.

SPEAKER_01 47:33

And like I think I just saw online like a few days ago, like everyone remembers the Will Smith eating pasta AI-made video, like literally like less than two years ago, and then they compared it to what it is today, and it's like exponentially like if you just sort of glance at it, it looks real, but obviously it's getting better. And then with AI accuracy and hallucinations, that's also getting better. It's um this came up a lot actually in debate of like, is AI good at teaching because of how accurate it is? And the ultimate response was sure, AI will never be truly accurate, but neither could humans.

Alex Kotran 48:15

Right. Right. Like teachers make mistakes as well, and that's we don't consider that a fatal flaw. Yeah, you're I mean, you're really you're you're you're really informed about this. I think this is a testament not just to your own brilliance, um, but to to speech and debate and and public forum. I mean, I just feel like I learned it's it's sort of like a fire hose for uh random topics, and you just sort of like have to learn how to get really smart on new things in a short amount of time. Do you have any parting advice? I'm not gonna say your teachers, but for for any educators, because a lot of the folks who are watching this are educators, you know, they might be hearing this and kind of freaking out about like, okay, like maybe I do need to be taking it more seriously that my kids are potentially using this, and maybe it's not just, you know, helping them do more creative work and augmenting their skills, but actually maybe just getting in the way. Like, what advice do you have for teachers that are trying to just stay on top of this? And this being sort of like the use of AI uh in and out of the classroom uh in ways that maybe they're not even necessarily aware of.

SPEAKER_01 49:12

I think you're gonna have to accept it eventually that AI is staying around. So figure out ways where AI can't just be like, don't say just write a paper. Maybe encourage students to actually use critical thinking in the classroom, not just in assignments. Figure out ways to teach those things that they're trying to replace with AI, like just by asking, or like have an interactive classroom where it's once again, just not just assignment, assignment, assignment. Uh, try to actually teach them.

SPEAKER_02 49:44

Yeah, I would say if you think that your kids are not using AI, they are. Every one of them is using AI. So definitely you're gonna have to get on top of it and accept it. But also I would say focus on the skills that you're trying to teach them rather than like the paper itself. The paper isn't the point. The point is that they develop skills for writing and then find a way to focus on the skills rather than the products or the grades. Because a lot of the reason why kids use AI is because they know they'd get a better grade if they used it than if they didn't. And so they don't develop those skills, but they're still rewarded by the system. So find a way to have maybe more hands-on activities, more in-classroom activities so that way you can monitor them and maybe more brainstorming sessions. Definitely try to incorporate like critical thinking, like what Anna said.

Alex Kotran 50:30

Charlotte, Anna, this was awesome. Great advice. Um, and good luck in your college search and in the last what, five weeks of your junior year?

SPEAKER_01 50:39

Something like that. Something like that. All right. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. Thanks you for inviting us.