Minnesota high school student weighs the benefits and pitfalls of AI

NINA MOINI: This week, as students and teachers are settling into a new school year, Minnesota Now is looking at how artificial intelligence is changing teaching, learning and well-being in the classroom. This week, we've talked with a consultant, working on AI policy at the district level and a high school teacher. Today, we're getting a student perspective. High school seniors in this year's graduating class were freshmen when ChatGPT launched in November of 2022. And every year since then, AI chatbots have become more prevalent.

My next guest is a high school senior who's done a lot of work with AI, but not in the way you might assume. Eliana Dollar-Simmons joins me now from Tartan High School. That's in the Eastern Twin Cities suburb of Oakdale. Eliana, thanks so much for being on Minnesota Now today. Welcome.

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

NINA MOINI: I'm really excited to get a student perspective, because I feel like it's really important to talk about the people or to the people that were wanting to support, as all of these changes are happening in the classroom and out of the classroom. Do you remember when you first started to hear about AI chatbots, and maybe when you first started using them?

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: When I was a sophomore, I started taking classes at St. Paul College. And my first ever class was a computer science class. So at the time, it wasn't the type of coding that you would have really been using AI for. But we were talking about, oh, there's people out there who are using AI to create entire websites.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, yeah. And a lot of times when we're thinking about AI, we're thinking about, maybe you Google something in class, or maybe people are at home working on papers and running it through the ChatGPT. But how do you use AI?

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: Personally, I love developing AI models that are able to solve complex problems. So for the past few years, I've been using my skills in programming and data science to create different deep learning models and machine learning models that can help answer questions.

NINA MOINI: Cool. So what are some of the things that you've explored?

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: Last summer I went to Carnegie Mellon University out in Pittsburgh for a 4-week summer program for computer science. And our big research capstone project was about customer churn. So we took a big data set of 500,000 customers in it and used that to try and determine the top three factors that would cause a customer to churn their subscription using a variety of different machine learning models.

NINA MOINI: Cool. So you're exploring. I like that you're exploring healthy ways and helpful ways to use AI. Because it is incredibly helpful, right? What do you like about working in this space and learning in this AI space?

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: I think that the thing I love the most is the fact that when working with data, it's like telling a story. A big aspect of making sure that technology is accessible and able to be communicated to others is that you understand what story you're trying to tell with it. So when I'm trying to communicate, here's the top three reasons that a customer might turn an app subscription. Or here are the top consistent foods that could be triggers for Crohn's symptoms. These types of questions have to be communicated in a way that's accessible and understandable for someone who's never seen any of the code that goes into the work.

NINA MOINI: Wow. Yeah, it sounds like you're really on the forefront of how to use this in a healthy and helpful way. What about sort of, in the classroom? Are there things that do concern you about AI use, or anything that you might see as, so to speak, cons if there are pros and there are cons in the classroom for students?

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: For sure. I know that for me personally, I tried to avoid using AI in the classroom because I feel as though it takes away from my ability to fully grasp and understand the material. But I do know a lot of people who will prefer to use it to help them with essays or to answer shorthand questions that they don't think are really necessary for them to know. And I'm more so of the mindset that if you what you're doing and you're trying to make your workflow more efficient, there's a time and a place where it can be really useful. But if you're using AI to solve problems that you wouldn't be able to solve on your own, then it's taking away from the learning opportunity that you otherwise would have gained from actually going through the problem solving process.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. Do you find that it's harder sometimes-- I know you're not using it, but maybe for friends of yours or other students to retain information, if the information is being given to you at a fingertip?

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: Definitely. A lot of people feel, especially with Google specifically, where if you search anything up, Gemini ends up coming up almost automatically. A lot of people don't exactly feel need to write as many things down or to repeat information to make sure they've got it. And so it's easy to look something up once and shout out the answer, but not so easy to review because later on the AI answer could change.

NINA MOINI: Do you feel like people feel pressure? I feel like sometimes high school can be a lot for people. They want to maintain their grades, but they want to do activities on-- you got to look good for college or whatever. Do you feel like some of these I shortcuts are just ways for people to relieve pressure?

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: For sure. I think that one of the bigger misconceptions that a lot of people have about teens right now is that we go to school, we slack off, we go home and maybe take a nap or go play video games or go do other things. And I faced that a lot personally. But in reality, I so many people who are working jobs, part time or sometimes full time in order to help support their family or themselves, or they're on a sports team. Those practices take ages.

Our school has a big theater program. They work late into the night. They will be in other extracurriculars. They'll be taking tough classes. A lot of students will do PSEO, where you might go on campus to a university to take classes. And of course, there's time and place for fun. But I think a lot of teenagers are looking for ways to stay organized and to take some of the workload off of their own shoulders.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, and building off of that, do you think that there is an impact that AI is having on, say, mental health among teenagers?

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: I would agree, yeah. I think that there's this idea of learned helplessness, where if I can't do it with this supposedly all-intelligent piece of technology, how am I supposed to do it on my own? A lot of people will use that technology in order to use shortcuts or try to make their work easier. But then when they don't have access to that technology and they're expected to do it on their own, they often aren't able to do it.

I think that leads to feelings of inadequacy or struggle that you don't really want to bring up, because then you have to admit the fact that you were struggling in the first place. Or you might feel like you're falling behind everyone else, who seems way more organized than you or way more on top of things. And in order to combat those feelings, people tend to use AI to get ahead. It ends up being a cycle.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, it's like that reliance. Everybody is struggling with the balance of how much reliance on AI is too much reliance. And when it comes to the classroom, I don't know if districts or individual classes have begun to set guardrails or some protections around that. Is there anything you see at your school or anything that you, just based on your observation, would recommend that people do inside of the classroom to set students up for success, understanding a lot of them have tablets and all of this information right in front of them?

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: I don't think there's a way to fully get away from how ingrained technology is in our classrooms. But something that all of my teachers have done is say that, well, if you really want to, you can use AI. But you're not going to be prepared for the AP exams at the end of the year. It comes at your own detriment if you get good grades using AI, but then you get to a test where you can't use it, and you aren't sure what to do.

NINA MOINI: Yeah.

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: I think having that attitude has encouraged a lot more self-agency, at least amongst the students in my class, to say, if I do use it in order to push forward and get on top of my workload, I can't become reliant on it.

NINA MOINI: Yeah, it kind encourages self-discipline and putting off the instant reward or the instant hit of getting your answer that so many of us are struggling with, I think, no matter age. Eliana, before I let you go, I do want to because you're a senior, right? I wanna know kind of what you're hoping for maybe next year. I know AI is something, and coding is something that you're passionate about. Is that something you want to pursue?

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: Yeah, thanks for asking. Since this is my last year, I've definitely been looking at what colleges, what to major in. I think right now, I'm set on computer science, data science, maybe linguistics, because I have a big love for languages. And an integrated Masters is also something I've been looking at because I want to learn as much as possible.

NINA MOINI: Amazing. Eliana, I wish you well, and I really thank you for stopping by Minnesota Now and sharing your perspective. It's very important. Thank you.

ELIANA DOLLAR-SIMMONS: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.

NINA MOINI: Thank you. That's Eliana Dollar-Simmons, a senior at Tartan High School in Oakdale. That's a suburb just east of St Paul. Tomorrow, I'll talk to a mental health advocate about the impact of AI on teen well-being. And hey, if you missed Minnesota Now's other conversations about AI and education, you can find them in podcast feeds or at nprnews,org.