A student stresses over their homework, her face scrunching up in confusion as she remains lost on how to start her assignment. She glances up at the clock as each passing minute leads to no progress. Growing more frustrated by the second, she closes her textbook with a sigh and opens ChatGPT to receive answers to the questions.

After the release of ChatGPT in 2022, the modern world has accepted artificial intelligence as a significant part of everyday life. According to a UNESCO report published in 2024, 4 in 5 young people use AI tools every day. Students, including Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students, encounter AI in everything from search engines, such as Google and Bing, to academic help.

“The first time I started using AI to cheat for school would be during COVID; it was the best time to use AI because nobody expected it at that time; it was still a new concept,” junior John Williams* said.

The United States respects “the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” as defined in the Constitution. With the introduction of AI, the ways these freedoms are expressed and limited have changed for students.

AI in the Classroom

With the growing accessibility and generative power of AI, many students around the nation are resorting to the tool to complete their schoolwork. The implications of this rising trend show a decline in student individuality and expression in their own words.

According to a 2024 Global AI Student Survey by the Digital Education Council, 86% of the 3,839 students surveyed used artificial intelligence in their studies, with 54% of those students using AI on a weekly or semiweekly basis.

However, many of the students who use AI reported that they do so for brainstorming elements of their assignments. This can include assistance in determining the titles for works, or topics for essays. Others employ AI sites, such as Gauth Math, to assist them in solving math problems by displaying the necessary steps.

Despite the positive uses of AI, many teachers at MSD feel that those who solely use AI to complete assignments miss out on the benefits that come with completing them. Teachers also express that the employment of AI, especially in written assignments, distances students from them, as teachers can no longer connect with them through their words.

“Whether their reasoning for using AI is because they put off the assignment for so long or just laziness, it’s obvious to us as teachers and for me, as a person who loves words, that AI was being used,” English teacher Debra Jacobson said. “How can we develop as human beings if something is always doing the work for you? We’re losing the ability to communicate and express our thoughts coherently.”

Teachers are not the only ones who share this sentiment. Many MSD students also express their frustrations with the widespread use of AI, particularly when others use the resource to gain an advantage.

“I won’t pretend like I haven’t ever used AI; it’s really helpful for coming up with ideas to write about or explain something we learned in class in simple terms,” sophomore Melia Dabach said. “But I think it’s unfair for some students to, for example, use AI to generate whole poems when I wrote my own to express my own ideas. Especially if they received a better score than I did when I’m the one who put in the effort to represent myself.”

If this trend continues, there may be a regression in people’s ability to express themselves through written word and speech. For instance, cheating on English assignments means that students do not have to read assigned material in order to answer corresponding questions, allowing them to avoid the task of reading altogether.

Consequently, students could struggle to learn new vocabulary, and may even fall below grade level in terms of reading skills, according to research published in the International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education in 2019.

As literacy levels in the U.S. continue to nosedive, as reported by the National Center for Education Statistics, there may continue to be a decrease in people with the ability to exercise their constitutional right to free speech. Broward County Public Schools has acknowledged that this decrease in literacy and critical thinking skills is a problem. They have communicated that they do not want students to use AI independently and have blocked the use of certain AI, including ChatGPT, on all district owned devices.

“Sometimes I do [use AI] in cases of emergency,” Williams* said. “For example, my history teacher produces a multitude of assignments that feel useless. He has these readings that every lesson or so he would publish an assignment analysis or packet. It just takes up too much time of my day. When he looks at it for just a participation grade, it’s easier to have the AI read the document and summarize it for you, especially when the document is 10-15 pages long.”

Yet, Florida’s usage of their AI to grade student essays in the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking exams–with no disclosure of the dataset used to train it–sets a precedent for Florida education. AI is biased in some cases, such as between English-proficient students and students who are not proficient. Thus, questions have been raised about AI’s effectiveness, especially in a state where 1 in 10 public school students were identified as “English learners” in 2019.

This year, the Florida Legislature passed House Bill 1361 to increase funding for AI in education. AI training has also been recommended by the Broward County School District for teachers.

The push for AI often does not address the bias within AI models. According to a survey conducted by the Center for Democracy and Technology, more than two-thirds of teachers report using an AI detection tool regularly. The survey showed that Black students are more than twice as likely as their white or Hispanic peers to have their writing incorrectly flagged as AI-generated.

“This assignment was from online geometry,” sophomore Isaac Lam said. “It was explaining how you got an answer in a graph; it was a while ago. I was explaining the process of using cosine, sine and tangent. It was pretty standard, so I’m assuming that many people put similar responses, and it flagged it high for AI, but that was just the way I did it.”

Thus, the platforms being used are not exempt from biases, which may disproportionately affect the grades of individual students. Turnitin, a plagiarism detection tool, had its AI detection discontinued in use in several universities after incorrectly deeming student work AI-generated.

“I feel like AI detector systems could be more sophisticated,” Lam said. “If a high institute like a college misinterprets your legitimacy, then that can have consequences on you.”

Within the education system, though, the usage of AI can also enable the growth of students, and there have been cases of teachers using AI tools to accelerate student learning. For instance, students in MSD’s journalism program employ sites such as Murrow.ai to assist in revising their stories to apply to stylistic preferences.

As AI continues to be encouraged in academic environments, the line between whether or not AI is being used as a resource or a means of cheating is becoming increasingly blurred. The Broward Schools Code of Conduct and the Discipline Matrix currently do not specifically address AI use.

However, Marjory Stoneman Douglas has created their own AI discipline policy that barred ChatGPT for assignments completely under the consequences of cheating. A teacher may choose to allow student usage of AI for brainstorming, revising or outlining. When using any AI, the tool must be disclosed or cited with a description of how it was used.

“[Using AI] depends on if the work is graded for participation or not and how long it is and how important it may be,” Williams* said. “If I’m going to write an essay for College Board, of course I’m going to do that solely by myself and only use AI to correct grammar mistakes. But, if it’s only an assignment that the teacher gives but doesn’t care about, I’ll have AI to do it.”

As the usage of AI is novel, it is unclear if the effects will be positive or negative. What is clear is that AI will continue playing a larger and larger part in schools.

AI in the Job Industry

Today, technology has already begun to take on roles that have been commonly held by workers for years. For instance, the implementation of the self-checkout aisle at grocery stores is beginning to replace the jobs of grocery store clerks. Technology can do this job without the hassle of human error, increasing the speed of checkout. However, this effectively removes a job that someone could have held.

The same effect can be seen with AI, where individuals are encouraged more and more by companies to pass on their own workload to AI or be entirely replaced.

AI will follow students out of school and into the workplace. As high school students graduate, they will attempt to find entry-level jobs or internships.

Due to the development of AI technologies, it is cheaper and more efficient for businesses to invest in these new tools than to hire people to do easily automated jobs. This creates a larger skill inequality within the workforce, where people are unable to gain the experience needed to meet job requirements, according to a 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge paper “Generative AI and the Future of Inequality.”As a result, job gaps, which show when there are not enough people to fill up the jobs at hand, will form.

This displacement will also be detrimental to those who currently perform these jobs. People with jobs as clerks depend on it as their source of income and may not have the means or the ability to work other jobs. According to the 2024 CNN article, “AI is replacing human tasks faster than you think,” more than half of large U.S. businesses plan to use AI this year to automate tasks done previously by workers.

This is one factor that has caused the decline in entry-level jobs; from 2021-2024, there was an 11% decrease in job postings for entry-level positions. According to a 2023 Goldman Sachs report, as many as 300 million full time jobs could be lost or diminished globally from the introduction of AI in the workforce. Workers in lower-wage jobs are up to 14 times more likely to need to change occupations than those in the highest wage positions.

“AI is coming. It’s here. There’s no avoiding it in the industry, whether it’s on the script side or the video side,” television production teacher Eric Garner said, “Over time, the software has gotten better and less and less people need to be involved, it is kind of bad that we’re losing jobs because of AI, but we’ve been doing that. It’s been trending down in jobs for 25 years.”

The introduction of AI into the job industry has serious implications for those whose livelihoods depend upon fields in creative industries. Those that typically use artistic industries see AI as a cheaper alternative. Students who want to continue as artists or graphic designers may find that journey even less viable to earn money.

“I don’t necessarily think AI will replace artists, since we are feeding it our art,” junior McKayla Barton said. “We still have the responsibility to create, but it’s just wrong that AI is stealing the work. I feel that people shouldn’t even be having their art stolen especially when the AI doesn’t even credit them. We need to find a way to prevent that.”

While AI advertises itself as making art creation accessible to everyone, the majority of artists will soon find their way of life unsustainable.

Through using art and other copyrighted works without permission, AI companies violate copyright law. This has led to current legal action in Andersen v. Stability AI, a case in which a group of artists is suing four companies on the basis of copyright infringement for the use of their art in training data for AI.

Artists have fought back by ‘glazing’ their work—a process that makes the artwork illegible to AI— in an attempt to poison datasets, but this has had little effect overall.

“There’s this one app that people were using where you would put in your art piece to use it to give dynamic lighting, but it would put your art into AI,” Barton said. “I think it was funny that people retaliated against it by giving it junk drawings and scribbles, so it would put out a bad final product. When people realize there’s a program out there intended to steal the art, they usually get fellow artists to essentially corrupt the system.”

AI is not only a cheaper resource of labor to create future work but also displaces the profit of current work done by humans. AI scrapes massive amounts of data, from which it is trained to recognize patterns and create predictions.

AI has also lowered the amount of money journalists are able to make off of their work. In 2023, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI alleging copyright infringement and using their works to train ChatGPT. ChatGPT, when prompted, was able to recreate identical paragraphs of NYT articles and work. News organizations are not reimbursed for the work they create.

“I use [AI] to organize transcriptions, and I use it if I’m really stuck on trying to say something,” local Parkland news content director Janice Seitz said. “[AI] helps me pull out the information I need from a whole bunch of information, and it’ll help me organize it in that way. But very rarely do I do that, because I’m writing about a family. And so, it’s personal, AI, doesn’t have that personal touch. AI can’t write about a family the way I can after talking to them.”

In the majority of these cases, OpenAI and other companies simply cite transformative fair use. This has caused calls for AI transparency through datasets made of non-copyrighted works.

Protests and Backlash

Citizens and workers whose communities and jobs are replaced or impacted by AI have been fighting back through protests. Another cause for protests has been the ravaging of the environment and communities by the technology sector.

AI searches require massive amounts of power. Senior research analyst at the Allen Institute for AI Jesse Dodge said in a 2024 NPR interview, “One query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes.”

To address this lack of power, more companies have shown interest in creating their own data energy centers. A single data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of drinking water per day, enough for thousands of households.

Northern Virginia has the world’s largest concentration of data centers, and the higher demand of computing power for AI means an expansion of data centers. The Piedmont Environmental Council campaigned against it because of “electricity cables being built over conservation land, parks and neighbourhoods, increased water demand, and the facilities’ back-up diesel generators affecting air quality.” Residents are also expected to help pay for the developments. Protesters have shown up to industry conferences in Virginia.

Uruguay’s citizens protested against the plan to build a Google data center that would affect water consumption during times of drought. This year, 16 data centers have been approved in Chile whilst the country is in the middle of a longtime drought. The Socio-Environmental Community Movement for Land and Water staged a series of demonstrations against the big tech companies building the water wasting tech centers.

As AI gets increasingly popular, companies will push for more data centers. Open AI CEO Sam Altman has recently invested in South Florida AI data center energy startup Exowatt, a growing trend that means more communities could suffer due to data centers being built in their regions. Florida may see similar effects of zoning practices where loud industrial buildings and data centers will be placed near low income communities that cannot move.

Protests have also revolved around humanitarian rights. Experts conceded that AI is currently too unreliable to independently create decisions that would keep ordinary civilians out of harm’s way.

Google employees protested their company in front of offices across the country due to the company’s usage of AI to participate in the Gaza conflict. Google Cloud AI had a joint effort with Israel to create Project Nimbus–including facial recognition, object tracking and other custom technology from Google and Amazon Web Services.

The U.S., a main funder of the Israeli military, has followed suit with its own AI, known as Project Maven, which has located rocket launchers in Yemen and targeted strikes in Iraq and Syria.

However, it is worse at identifying tanks than humans, especially in adverse weather conditions, according to the 2024 Bloomberg article “Inside Project Maven, the US Military’s AI Project.” These errors add up to create more civilian casualties and an escalation of conflict when made to function without humans.

Industries have also faced protests due to the replacement of workers in creative fields. The emergence of AI led to the Writers Guild of America strike in May 2023. The writers and story directors felt that streaming and the pressures to deliver completed content with such a short turnaround time was too much work for the amount they were being compensated.

Additionally, the convenience of the AI that many production companies were employing was quickly leading to fewer writers and artists being hired for projects, which significantly cheapened labor.

In September 2023, the Writers Guild of America allowed Hollywood screenwriters to set regulations against the use of AI in their work. Their goal is to protect the rights of their writers and prevent any creative liberties from being breached.

According to the WGA’s 2023 Minimum Basic Agreement Provisions, “A writer can choose to use AI when performing writing services if the company consents and the writer follows any applicable company policies, but the company can’t require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services.”

However, the strike poses the question of what the future of creative expression and compensation for those in media will look like with AI quickly taking the place of artists. For MSD students looking to enter the film industry, how their creative ideas will be expressed remains uncertain.

“AI will never do the same work that humans do the same way humans do it when it comes to storytelling,” senior Riley Walsh said. “If AI is writing a story, it’s not going to have the same genuine connection and genuine human aspect of it. I think that it’s important that we as a society make rules and regulations on what AI can be used for.”

The internet has seen a massive increase in AI song creation. Spotify AI artists have reached hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners. A lack of original songs and no other social media presence indicates a ‘fake artist.’ Spotify does not have any regulations preventing the usage of AI tools and pushes these ‘fake artists’ through large, curated playlists surrounded by legitimate artists.

While AI has been opposed, it can also be used as a tool to advocate. Six families of the students who died here at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Feb. 14, 2018 shooting are using AI voice copies in calls to Congress to push for gun reform in a project known as The Shotline by March for Our Lives.

“It’s been six years, and you’ve done nothing, not a thing to stop all the shootings that have continued to happen since,” Parkland victim Joaquin Oliver’s AI generated voice said, “I’m back today because my parents used AI to recreate my voice to call you. Other victims like me will be calling too, again and again, to demand action. How many calls will it take for you to care? How many dead voices will you hear before you finally listen?”

Social Media Misinformation

With the influx of AI flooding social media, the effects of the limitless capabilities of AI technology have been seen.

Social media has traditionally been a place for people to express themselves in an anonymous space beyond traditional society. Nowadays, AI can create fabricated images, text and even sound, depending on the platform. While people can use AI to assist them in creating short form content or other social media posts, people have to begin becoming aware that not everything they see online is true.

A study across three social media platforms showed an increase in AI-generated content. However, normal content generally received more interaction than AI generated posts. With AI in social media, the internet runs the risk of intentional or accidental misinformation being more widespread.

AI is extremely susceptible to creating misinformation. One of the most extreme examples is AI ‘hallucinations,’ where a lack of data causes the AI to generate ideas completely detached from reality. This has shown up through ChatGPT inventing references to non-existent information sources or Google’s Bard AI generating made-up Holocaust survivor quotes.

These hallucinations became apparent when a viral Google AI overview for the question “how many rocks should I eat per day” answered with “one small rock per day,” citing fictitious Berkeley scholars.

Google promotes its AI overview and keeps it at the top of a search page, making it the first thing people see when they look up a question. Because of the frequent errors in the platform, people are more susceptible to seeing this false information and thus are more likely to believe it.

Because AI can only generate what it is trained on in the same standardized voice, social media will have fewer new perspectives and original forms of expression. When more and more content is made using AI, experts predict that AI could eventually destroy the usefulness of social media sites by generating enormous amounts of content and surpassing what humans can make.

This has begun to happen with various social media sites, including Facebook. With an algorithm where one in three posts is recommended by artificial intelligence, posts with AI-generated images have risen to millions of views. Many sites have begun to implement the requirement of disclosure of AI-generated content as a way to combat this.

There have been instances of AI being used intentionally and unintentionally to generate terrorist and antisemitic propaganda because of a lack of filters for prompts. The wide and often unrestricted data sets allow AI to create non-consensual deep fake sexual content and child sexual abuse material.

AI is not bias-less. The data fed into AI is created by humans with human biases which then AI will take and amplify. This was the concern of UNESCO, which found that AI may have been trained on data from Holocaust denial websites and caused AI to claim that Nazis like Adolf Hitler and Goebbels were not involved in the Holocaust.

Political biases also occur in models such as Deepseek, a new popular Chinese AI model, which prevents political questions relating to Taiwan from being displayed due to Chinese AI censoring. Other models have also shown political leanings; ChatGPT often promotes left-wing libertarianism and Meta’s Large Language Model Meta AI gives more conservative-leaning responses, according to a 2023 article published in the MIT technology review.

However, AI is often intentionally used to promote biases through AI-generated content as a form of propaganda.

An AI-generated picture of a girl surviving Hurricane Helene received millions of views online and was used to criticize the disaster response of the Biden administration. Those running political campaigns already use AI to promote themselves to voters. One instance was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign sharing fake AI-generated images of President Donald Trump embracing Anthony Fauci. Voter manipulation leads to an erosion of trust between voters and candidates.

Proposed Future Action

Experts say there needs to be certain limits put in place for free speech when using AI. The world collectively, especially the U.S., has little to no regulation on what companies like OpenAI allow their users to do.

The race for countries to be the global AI leader is also partially due to the fact that AI gives enormous power to governments to control the narratives of the media. America has invested the most money out of all nations–$500 billion into developing AI technology–to continue growing economically.

Experts recommend establishing an international standard to regulate the use of AI to prevent the violation of humanitarian laws.

Looking forward, we can acknowledge that AI will be a part of future careers and will continue to drive great technological advancement and change. Students should have awareness of the effects of using AI personally, as well as the societal implications they agree to by supporting these companies through using their products.

As AI exists across national borders, experts advocate for global laws and regulations to preserve free speech.

“I think [AI] is a reality,” Garner said. “We’re not going to be able to avoid it. So I think it’s incredibly important that here on the front end, you learn how to use it as a tool. This is just going to take some time; we’re going to have to figure it out.”

*Names indicated were changed to protect the students’ anonymity

This story was originally published in the March 2025 Eagle Eye print edition.