What Students Really Think About AI Generated Media In Their Courses: A Teacher’s On-the-Ground Observation
After the bell rang last Wednesday, Mia lingered by my desk while I stacked midterm essays, the ring from my morning coffee already bleached into the fake wood grain. She twisted the strap of her canvas tote, chipped navy nail polish catching the fluorescent light, and pulled out her phone to show me her final project for creative nonfiction. It’s a three-minute audio essay about her grandma’s Alzheimer’s, she said, and I used AI to generate the photos that go with it. They’re not real, but they look just like the house she grew up in, just like the lemon pie she used to bake every Sunday. Then she bit her lip and asked, “Is this cheating? I don’t want to get a zero, but I don’t have a real camera to go take photos there now that it’s sold, and I can’t draw that good.”
I told her I wasn’t going to mark her down before I heard what she’d done. She walked me through the process: she’d spent two hours describing every detail to the image generator, adjusting the prompt over and over to get the slant of the porch roof right, the chipped blue paint on the kitchen cabinet where her grandma kept her mixing bowls. She’d cropped and filtered every image herself, matched them to the pauses in her audio. All the words, all the story, that was hers. She just needed help with the visuals.
After that conversation, I made a point to ask more of my 11th grade students what they think about using AI generated media in their class work—everything from images and animations to slide backgrounds and audio clips, not just full essays. I’d sat through enough staff meetings where we only talked about preventing cheating, and I realized I’d never actually asked the kids what they thought.
A few days later, during study hall, I leaned over the table where Javi and Ty were putting the final touches on their AP Bio presentation on antibiotic resistance. They’d used AI to generate a 30-second 3D animation showing how random mutation leads to resistance in a bacterial colony. Ty spun his laptop around to show me, and shrugged when I asked if he thought it counted as cheating. “If I tried to draw that, it would just be a bunch of colored blobs no one could understand,” he said. “This lets everyone actually see what we’re talking about. We still had to fix it, though—first version got the science wrong, put the mutation after the antibiotic hit instead of before. We rewrote the whole script, fact checked every frame. It’s just the drawing part it did.” Javi jumped in: “It’s no different than a calculator. No one yells at you for using a calculator to do the arithmetic so you can focus on learning the algebra, right? This does the part I don’t have the skill for, so I can focus on the part that actually matters.”
The next day, Leo, a quiet student with dyslexia who rarely stays after class, pulled me aside. He told me he uses AI to help him put together presentation slides. “I know exactly what I want to say,” he said, staring at his shoes. “It just gets stuck between my brain and the page. I write bullet points, AI turns them into full sentences that make sense, and I change almost all of them to sound like me anyway. I also use it to make diagrams and backgrounds because that takes me hours otherwise. But my mom says any AI at all is cheating, so I don’t tell her when I use it.”
That’s the part no one talks about enough, I’ve realized. Most adults default to the narrative that kids use AI to cut corners, but that’s not what I’m seeing. Most students grew up with this tool; it’s as normal to them as Google was when I was in high school. They’re not all out to cheat. Most of the time, they’re using it to fill gaps: gaps in art skill, gaps in editing knowledge, gaps that make it hard for some kids to get their ideas out at all. What they do have is a lot of anxiety. Almost every student I talked to said they never know what the rules are. One teacher bans all AI, another lets you use it for anything, so they’re constantly walking on eggshells, scared they’ll break a rule they never knew existed.
From what I’ve learned over this past year, there are small, concrete things both teachers and parents can do to make this easier. For teachers, skip the blanket “no AI allowed” policy. Be specific. I tell my students upfront: you can use AI to generate images, backgrounds, and outlines. All original writing and analysis has to be yours, and you just have to note what you used AI for at the end of your project. That removes all the guesswork, and it stops kids from hiding what they’re doing.
For parents, swap out the accusatory “did you use AI on this?” for “what part of this project did AI help you with?” That simple change in phrasing opens up a conversation instead of putting your kid on the defensive. My neighbor, a parent of a 9th grader, tried this a few months back after she noticed AI in his history project. She was sure he’d cheated, but when he showed her how he used it, he explained he’d used AI to turn old family home videos into a clear timeline of his grandma’s immigration, something he never could have done with his basic editing skills. He did all the research, wrote all the narration, AI just did the editing heavy lifting. She never would have known that if she’d started with an accusation.
Of course, there are still problems. Last week I got a final project that was 100% AI generated, the student didn’t change a word or add any original thought. That still needs to be addressed, just like any other case of plagiarism. But that’s not the majority of what I see.
I still don’t have all the answers. Every week there’s a new situation I haven’t encountered before, a new use of AI I didn’t expect. But what I know for sure is that if we want students to use this tool responsibly, we have to start by asking them what they think, instead of just assuming the worst. Right now, being open and clear is working better than any ban I’ve tried. We’re all just figuring this out as we go, and that’s okay.
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