Across 80+ countries, 1 million classrooms use an AI chatbot program called "SchoolAI". It's a program that launched in 2023, and teachers can control everything about the program from the instructions it gives, to activity procedures and the type of insights they want to surface. Teachers who use this program can also see the conversations between the students and the AI, and they are alerted when something concerning comes up. 

It may sound like a good thing, but that's where you'd be wrong. Coming from my own experiences with it and the observations I've made of other's experiences with the program, SchoolAI doesn't always work in the way it's supposed to. The biggest factor that makes SchoolAI a bad thing is that it's a generative AI program, and has the same affects as the countless of other AI chatbots that exist online. I'm not talking about just the environmental affects, but affects on the students themselves.

Just like other chatbots such as ChatGPT, Students can become increasingly reliant on what the chatbot says, and I can speak from personal experience on that. The more I was given acess to SchoolAI to help with assessments in class, the more I would prefer to use that over my own research or revision. I would solely use SchoolAI to revise essays and never doing my own self-rivison. I would believe that the score the AI gave me on my essays is what I'd actually get as my final grade, just for me to then be shocked whenever I got full points regardless of the score the AI gave me. Ever since the program was introduced to my previous school when I was in 8th grade, I had been reliant on SchoolAI for help whenever I had acess to it, and I didn't vow to never use it again until about halfway through my 9th grade year.

Aside from all of that, the other biggest concern when it comes the SchoolAI, is that it's a generative AI program. If you didn't already know, generative AI doesn't run on electricty and instead runs on water, making it a contributor to water contamination and the destruction of our enviroment. There's videos online from people who live near data centers that AI runs on, and these people don't the water for things such as sinks and showers, and any water they do manage to get is contaminated. This is what generative AI does to our enviroment.

SchoolAI is one of several AI chatbots contributing to the negative affects on people and the environment, and it's being provided as a tool by those who shouldn't be condoning the use of AI, and should be enforcing doing things yourself and asking reak people for help. Students functioned and worked completely fine before we used SchoolAI, there is no reason for this program to exist, and now it's our responsibility if we want to see it gone. The company will keep thriving as long as people continue to use and promote it, and we as a society are the only ones who can change that.