Dear High School Students,
Whether you use it to poke fun at its mistakes, or depend on it for assistance on procrastinating for math tests, AI is being used by many of you.
AI uses water and pollutes the environment. It causes the employed to lose jobs because their job is getting automated. It damages the brain’s close reading and critical thinking skills. These are unavoidable facts you should already know.
Students, artists and writers are discouraged to produce creatively and develop close reading skills due to AI. Many younger students are not developing critical thinking in the classroom. Kids our age use AI like Snapchat AI for quick answers to questions. Studies have even questioned that “if we collectively start offloading such skills to generative AI systems, what then will that mean for developing the critical analysis and argumentation skills that are crucial for academic success?” Other studies showed that ⅔ of students who used AI had poor problem solving skills compared to those who didn’t. You may not even realize how students write with 10 times more unique ideas without AI when writing essays. Additionally, both artists AND writers have expressed concerns about creative works not having value in the future- all because of AI. If you stop using AI, you will help keep creativity and critical thinking skills alive.
By 2030, 30% of jobs will be automated. This impacts many of us, as well as those hard-workers. Following the change from the Victorian era to the Industrial era, there were many changes including the shift of dehumanizing work, child labour growing rapidly for factories, and increase in poverty. The Industrial revolution happened when we went from a society focused on agarian and handicraft economy to one of industry and machine manufacturing. This was an economical change caused by a growth in technology. Similarly, AI has the power to affect jobs and change balance in economic status.
Did you know carbon emissions from AI were equal to that of New York City? Consumption from freshwater exceeded the amount of water used for bottled water, and an outrageous demand for water worldwide will reach 4.2-4.6 billion cubic meters by 2027! This is an incredible waste of natural resources that harshly damages our planet each day, which can be avoided if you cut down on the use of AI.
Many of you talk about AI’s ability to upgrade the medical field in areas like drug repurposing and more. I myself went to a conference at Claremont Colleges about how AI can help come up with diabetes treatments. My question is how would you even get into the field of medicine while relying so heavily on AI to learn? Why be in medicine if you can’t understand at all?
AI is wasting away your future at this second. Both your life and the lives of others will be affected if you don’t stop using it. So stop sugar-coating it, and turn off ChatGPT.
Sincerely,
The Human, Lila Golden
Sources
https://uen.pressbooks.pub/teachingandgenerativeai/chapter/automated-aid-or-offloading-close-reading-student-perspectives-on-ai-reading-assistants/https://copyrightalliance.org/artists-speak-out-harm-unlicenced-ai-ingestion/
https://www.history.org.uk/primary/resource/3871/victorian-britain-a-brief-history#:~:text=The%20Industrial%20Revolution&text=There%20were%20huge%20social%20costs,and%20exposure%20to%20all%20weathers.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Industrial-Revolutionhttps://www.nu.edu/blog/ai-job-statistics/
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/opinion-ai-is-destroying-our-planet-we-must-act
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/A-New-Direction-for-Students-in-an-AI-World-FULL-REPORT.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10385763/https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ai-has-environmental-problem-heres-what-world-can-do-about
https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/07b3c8fc-bd30-4b92-b5f4-d665e927b59d/content
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/learning/teachers-on-how-ai-is-reshaping-the-classroom.html
