Letter to School Board

Dear {list school board member names},

We are writing to you to express our concerns about the effects of generative AI and chatbots on our students. Since ChatGPT was released in 2022, university professors have seen increasing numbers of high school graduates who are unable to write without the aid of AI.

K-12 students are at a critical time in their cognitive development, where they must learn how to think for themselves. The productive struggle that comes from working through a problem is undermined by AI.

AI's harmful impact on students are proven by significant academic research:

• As AI was rolled out to over 26,000 students in grades 7-12, homework scores increased by 18%, and exam scores fell by 20%.
• When students used "AI tutors", they end up relying on them and perform poorly when the chatbots are no longer available.
• Students who used AI chatbots performed worse than students who took notes.
• Commercially-available chatbots "agree" with the user even if the user is factually incorrect.
• AI even has negative effects on trained professionals:
  • A study showed doctors who rely on it becoming less accurate at noticing precancerous lesions.
  • A separate study from Anthropic (creators of AI product Claude) showed that programmers who used AI to help with a task performed worse on follow-up questions than those who worked on the task alone.

These studies are best summarized as "the risks outweigh the benefits".

When talking about AI in schools, there are many common arguments that are used to argue in favour. We found this page useful for explaining why those arguments are not useful or accurate.

We are not opposed to a specific class in which students learn about generative AI: how it works, its effects on learning and the environmental impacts. However, integrating its use in other classes has harmful effects on learning.

Our community wants to see young adults who can think for themselves and are not reliant on online services like ChatGPT to do so.

{ Write your specific call to action here, like meeting to discuss more, or removing AI from the school }. We need your help in making this happen!

Warmly,

{Your names}