I know that I'm not the only person who's tired of Ai slop everywhere. It's not only the occasional  voiceover or YouTube slop; it's being put into advertising, campaigns, and now educational videos in schools.  I feel as though putting a product that reduses thinking in a place of education is both ignorant and hypocritical. Here's why.

According to the National Library of Medicine, a study was conducted with 54 students over 3 months split into 3 groups. One group had ChatGPT, one had regular browser research, and one had no online resources to write essays with. The National Library of Medicine points out "LLM users showed severe deficits in memory and essay ownership, with 83% being unable to quote from the essays they had just written." 83%. The National Library of Medicine also points out that this study shows that AI users, while receiving immediate improval in performance, they often create early reliance on AI and begin lacking strong cognitive used for learning, memory, and 'intellectual independence.' To simplify, AI usage quite literally mushes users brains and hurts connective pathways benefitting basic cognitive skill.

I would argue this is the exact opposite school attempts to teach us.

Not to mention the environmental harm AI does. According to the MIT, specifically generative AI, or AI that comes up with 'original' ideas based off of data it collects, zaps large amounts of energy sources, and intakes gallons of water to cool down the computer systems in AI data centers, which disrupt local enviorments and ecosystems. It also produces large amounts of carbon dioxide, which in case you didn't know, disrupts our atmosphere and causes global warming (which is a whole other problem on it's own). MIT states that "Each time a model is used, perhaps by an individual asking ChatGPT to summarize an email, the computing hardware that performs those operations consumes energy. Researchers have estimated that a ChatGPT query consumes about five times more electricity than a simple web search." It's this exact generative AI that schools are feeding information to in order to make these generative videos.

In conclusion AI, not only hurts students brain power and cognitive ability, but our enviorments with water waste, large energy disposal, and dangerous emissions of carbon dioxide. All to create a 10 minute video to educate a class teachers are being paid  to teach. It is literally their job to educate us this way. There is not a single excuse to use AI worth all the damage it deals. I hope this petition can reach enough people to remove AI usage and assistance in schools.