Students go to school to learn. Not to have a computer do the learning for them. As a New Jersey student, I have watched generative AI become increasingly common in schools. I have seen it used to create assignments, flyers, announcements, social media posts, and other school materials. I have also seen students rely on AI to write and complete work that is supposed to show what they know. This raises a bigger question: What happens to education when we stop doing the work ourselves? School is supposed to help us learn how to think, write, create, solve problems, communicate, and develop our own voices. When AI does those things for us, we lose the opportunity to practice them. And students aren’t the only ones who should be held accountable. If schools expect students to put in their own effort, educators should lead by example. Our schools have talented teachers and talented students who can write, design, create art, make videos, photograph events, and build meaningful materials without generative AI. What I’m asking New Jersey to do I am calling on the New Jersey Department of Education and State Board of Education to establish clear statewide limits on generative AI in schools. The policy I am asking for would: • Keep students from using generative AI to write, create, or complete academic work that is supposed to represent their own work. • Restrict personal and recreational generative AI use during school hours. • Prevent students from being required or pressured to use generative AI for schoolwork. • Establish consistent statewide expectations so students aren’t dealing with completely different rules in every classroom. • Limit unnecessary use of generative AI by educators to create assignments, announcements, flyers, social media content, and other school materials when they can reasonably be created by people. • Allow reasonable exceptions for approved accessibility, safety, administrative, and educational purposes. What do I mean by generative AI? Generative AI is technology that creates new content from a prompt, including essays, answers, images, artwork, presentations, videos, music, voices, computer code, assignments, flyers, announcements, and other original content. This petition is not about banning normal technology. Spellcheck, calculators, Canva, Google Workspace, Microsoft Office, accessibility tools, and other technology should not automatically be treated as generative AI. The focus is on technology being used to produce the work instead of the person who is supposed to create it. Why now? AI is becoming part of everyday life incredibly quickly. If we wait until it has completely changed how students learn, it may be much harder to establish meaningful boundaries. This isn’t about being afraid of technology. It’s about making sure technology doesn’t replace effort, creativity, critical thinking, and actual learning. Students should be able to look at an essay, project, piece of artwork, presentation, or other assignment and honestly say: “I created this.” If you agree that students deserve the chance to learn through their own work, sign this petition and share it. Let’s keep students at the center of education.