What Students Really Think About AI Generated Media In Their Courses: A Teacher’s Perspective
The bell had just rung for lunch last month, and most of my 10th grade English students were shoving notebooks into their backpacks and dodging the kid who was chasing a friend with a water bottle. Mia hung back, twisting the blue friendship bracelet on her wrist, her digital photo essay printed out and tucked in a folder. When the room cleared, she slid it across my desk, her jaw tight. “I need to tell you something,” she said. “I used AI to generate the first two photos. My grandma doesn’t have any actual pictures of her garden from when she first moved here, and I couldn’t get the look I wanted any other way. I didn’t cheat. All the words are mine.”
I’d been asking every student I could that month what they thought about AI generated media in their classes, so Mia’s confession turned into a 20-minute conversation after lunch that I’ve been thinking about ever since. For the past 10 weeks, I’ve turned every spare five minutes of homeroom or after-class check-in into an informal chat, just asking how they actually feel about this thing that dominates every education newsletter and parent-teacher conference I attend these days. What I’ve heard isn’t the panic or rampant cheating most of us talk about when we get together. It’s a lot more nuanced, and a lot more useful for figuring out how to handle this as teachers and parents.
A group of my juniors in AP Bio told me last week they used AI to generate a 3D model of a mitochondria for their group presentation after their free animation software crashed the night before it was due. “It’s just like using a calculator,” one of them said, leaning against my desk while they waited for their next class. “No one says it’s cheating if I use a calculator to do the arithmetic for my lab report when I already know how to do the math. This was the same thing. We just didn’t want to fail because the software broke.” Another student, Javi, a senior who’s applying to illustration programs, had a totally different take. He told me he hates when teachers don’t set any rules about AI generated art for final projects. “Half the kids in my studio class just plug a prompt into Midjourney and turn it in, and they get the same grade I get for spending 15 hours drawing something by hand,” he said. “It doesn’t feel fair. My work is supposed to be what gets me into college, but why does it matter if anyone can just make one in 30 seconds?”
What surprised me most is how almost every student I talked to draws a clear line between using AI as a shortcut and using it as a tool. Almost all of them agreed that turning in a full AI-written essay as your own work is cheating. That’s not a controversial point for them. What confuses them is the inconsistency. One teacher bans any AI use at all, another lets students use it for anything, and a third says it’s fine for outlines but not for drafts, and no one writes that down anywhere. A lot of them told me they’re scared to use it even when it would help, because they don’t want to get accused of cheating.
That fear is even worse with AI detectors, which I’ve seen flag perfectly original student work as AI generated dozens of times. Last semester, one of my straight A students cried after her research paper got flagged; she’d written the whole thing by hand in a notebook first, then typed it up. “It’s not fair that a machine gets to decide I’m a cheater before anyone even reads my work,” she told me. That’s a feeling I hear over and over: students hate being treated like potential cheaters first, just because AI exists.
This isn’t just a classroom issue, it’s something parents deal with at home too, when their kid mentions using AI for homework and you immediately panic. What I’ve started doing that works is really simple, and parents can do it too. First, instead of immediately asking “Did you use AI to cheat?” ask “What did you use AI for, and what parts of this project are yours?” That question doesn’t assume they did anything wrong, and it gives them space to explain. Last week I tried that with a sophomore who turned in a really polished poem, and he told me he used AI to generate 10 bad opening lines when he was stuck, then threw all of them out and wrote his own. That’s a good use of the tool, and it never would have come out if I’d just accused him of cheating.
The second thing I do is require a one-sentence disclosure at the end of every project: if you used AI for anything, from generating images to fixing your grammar to outlining, just tell me what it did. No penalty for transparency. That takes the guessing out of it, and it teaches students to be accountable for what they make. It also lets me see when a student is using AI to do all the hard work for them, instead of guessing or relying on a wonky detector.
Last week, Mia brought her grandma to our school’s arts night, and they stood by the display of her photo essay for 20 minutes. Her grandma told me the AI got the way the sun hit the rose bushes exactly right, better than any actual photo she’d seen from that time. I still don’t have all the answers. I worry about students getting too used to letting AI do the hard parts of learning that help you grow. I get Javi’s frustration when people don’t value the work of putting pencil to paper. But what I know for sure is that we can’t figure this out by just talking to each other, as teachers and parents. We have to ask the kids what they think. They’re the ones living with this every day, and most of them have already thought a lot more about it than we give them credit for. Right now, what’s working is being clear, asking questions, and trusting them to tell the truth until they give us a reason not to. That’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a lot better than guessing and banning everything sight unseen.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Students Really Think About AI Generated Media In Their Courses: A Teacher’s Perspective