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Amari Holt, 13, has a very busy schedule. She wakes up at 5:45 a.m. to get ready for school, which starts at 7 a.m. After classes, she has 15 minutes to change into costume for school play rehearsals. From there she’ll be running lines and learning stage blocking until about five or six in the evening, when she’ll get back home. After dinner, she still has about an hour and a half of homework to contend with. “It’s a little tough, but I like it,” the seventh grader tells Teen Vogue.
Headlines about Gen Z and Gen Alpha often describe these groups as incapable, indolent iPad kids, linking young people with declining attention spans, lackluster literacy skills, and inexorable technology addiction. Much of the blame is placed on the internet and its ever-looming presence in our daily lives, with a growing focus on the use of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT for homework and exams.
According to a Pew Research Center study released in January, more teenagers are using ChatGPT for their homework, with 26% of them age 13 to 17 reporting that they have used the AI service to help with their assignments this year, compared with 13% who used it two years ago. As traditional tech companies continue to roll out AI chatbots and summarization features on their platforms, Amari says, the use of AI has indeed become more common at her school. “Usually if kids don't get the work done, they'll probably use ChatGPT or they use their Snapchat AI,” she says. “I try to use it as little as possible, though.”
Amari is not the only one who feels that way. After all, the data shows that the majority of teenagers are still not using AI in their assignments (though, of course, self-reported studies are sometimes not entirely accurate). In conversations with Teen Vogue, students say that, despite the rising commonality of AI tools, they still have a desire to learn on their own — even if some of their peers are turning to shortcuts.
Sadie, 16, who asked to redact her surname for privacy, just committed to a college where she'll play soccer. She’s also staunchly against using ChatGPT for schoolwork, partly because she doesn’t want to have to learn how to use it and partly because she doesn’t want to get in trouble for using it; mostly, though, she’s against using it because she feels she’d be cheating herself on the process of digesting new information. “I think that sometimes it's a little bit unfair how people can get answers from it without really knowing what they're reading,” Sadie explains. “They just use what they see and aren’t really processing it. I think that's just the main reason why I’m against it.”
Amari thinks the characterization of Gen Alpha as dependent on shortcuts to do homework doesn’t represent the entire generation. “I feel like it's true to a certain degree,” she says. “Students that don’t try would probably use AI, but students that want to try to get good grades wouldn't. The students at my school who aren't that committed to getting good grades would use that as a last-minute resource, an hour before the assignment is due.”
Sadie agrees that, most of the time, the likelihood of someone using AI for homework depends on how much they and their friends care about doing well in school. And they often get caught. “We were supposed to analyze an article, and somebody copied and pasted an entire essay about it,” she recalls. “They got caught because it said ‘from ChatGPT’ at the bottom or something, and our teacher called them out for it.”
The reason Amari doesn’t like to use AI tools for school is that she knows that some of the information the summaries pull can be incorrect or oversimplified, and she isn’t keen to wade into the waters of fact-checking every individual piece of information when she can instead just open up a reliable source like a textbook. “I feel like it's easier to try yourself instead of using AI to do it for you,” she says. “And I feel like I would be concerned if a teacher found out that I used it.”
While some schools and governments have taken measures against it, with cities like New York City even banning ChatGPT from public school computers and networks, the presence of AI now extends far beyond students covertly searching up generative answers to cheat on pop quizzes. AI features are at the forefront of every major tech service, almost a forced opt-in for children and adults alike.
JP Peralta, a New York-based drama instructor and Amari’s former teacher, says that people are asking the wrong questions about young people’s literacy skills and the use of AI. The real issue, Peralta says, is the way tech companies are embedding these tools at the forefront of their platforms, combined with a lack of critical media and cultural literacy in schools. “What I find the biggest issue with AI actually is when the kids have to do any sort of research,” he says. “Google's f**ked right now. You open it up and the first thing is an AI overview. Kids have always been skimming the reading, but now they're skimming something that's already four-degrees removed from any primary source.”
In observing his students, Peralta doesn’t think AI is the primary reason behind declining literacy benchmarks; rather, he considers it a byproduct of the hefty budgetary rollbacks the education system has faced over the years. Schools received supplementary federal COVID funding that boosted budgets to fund programs and staff, but as the expiration deadline passed last year and the money dried up, many schools have been faced with the dilemma of addressing unrelenting inflation and declining enrollment with smaller budgets. President Trump’s education priorities involve dismantling the Department of Education; during his first week in office, he suspended some staff at the agency and eliminated all diversity, equity, and inclusion measures.
“I think illiteracy, specifically, is not being impacted by AI,” Peralta says. “I think that cultural literacy and media literacy, and the ability to do efficient, effective, and accurate research is really, really hampered. These kids don't know how to just skip the AI overview and find something different, so they come away with questionable takeaways that are like, 'You're missing the entire point of this, but how could you have known any better?'”
Nina, 12, a student in New York who asked to keep her surname private for security reasons, says she hasn’t seen a lot of students in her grade using ChatGPT, but she has heard her parents and other adults talk about AI and concerns about its application in school. It doesn’t seem like a very appealing option to her: “I don’t know much about AI, but I feel like if you do that often, you won't learn anything,” she says. “You need to learn how to do things on your own.”
Teenagers themselves are aware of the downsides of being too online. Many young people have largely supported laws like Australia’s movement to ban under-16 year olds from social media, as they attribute poor mental health and self-esteem to making profiles when too young. Says Nina, “As people, we should have other hobbies than just sitting on our butts and watching TV or being on our phones and stuff.”
The students who spoke to Teen Vogue are heavily invested in after-school programs and extracurriculars such as dance classes, soccer practice, and theater rehearsal. But many students don’t have access to these resources, which have been collateral damage in COVID-impacted education budget cuts as well. Still, even on their own, they have offline interests. Sadie enjoys reading fantasy books, while Amari prefers young adult stories like The Outsiders. Nina spends lots of time drawing. On a video call with Teen Vogue, she shares a self-portrait she drew, a pencil sketch inspired by one of her baby photos.
Amari says she imagines that, in the future, she’ll likely have to use some form of AI in school, based on what she sees from the adults around her. “I feel like if I get older, I'll probably end up using it,” she says. “My mom doesn’t use it, but my uncle is in college and he uses it sometimes for his assignments.”
Nina says thinking too much about the future makes her feel scared. She doesn’t know much about how AI functions, but hearing about the products that tech corporations are creating doesn’t seem like it will be helpful for young people like her at all. “This whole robot thing worries me the more and more people are starting to invent these certain types of things,” she says. “People always thought of flying cars, and here we are in 2025, and we don't even have that yet.”
