Across the metro-Atlanta area, teenagers are becoming more exposed to artificial intelligence (AI) in their schools. However, AI has consequences that stretch beyond the classroom, influencing higher education and young people in the workforce.
With AI use on the rise in educational settings, some students are turning to it more and more, creating a growing reliance among young people. In recent years, artificial intelligence chatbots have gained popularity among youth. In a Pew Research study conducted in the Fall of 2025, 64% of teens reported using an AI chatbot.
High school senior Emily Chambliss, 17, explains that “Right now, I try not to use it too much, but when I do use it, I usually use it for math when I don’t understand the concept, to get it to explain it to me, because if I look it up on Google, I get the answer but not an explanation.”
In fact, many teens are using AI for educational purposes. Another Pew Research study reports that 54% of teens use AI for help with schoolwork, with 10% doing all or most of their schoolwork with AI’s help.
About a quarter of teens find AI very helpful for schoolwork, and an additional quarter finds it somewhat helpful. Georgia State University Professor Dr. Reneau has been teaching for almost 15 years and currently uses AI in the classroom to teach biology.
“I believe they’ve gotten popular because it speaks directly to the student in a language that students understand,” she says, explaining the rise of generative AI in education. She adds that sometimes faculty members miss the mark when communicating with students. “And so chatbots really do have that ability to engage and be more conversational with our students in a way that they appreciate, and they’ve been doing amongst themselves.”
Generative AI is a tool that produces original text, images, videos, or audio content based on a user’s prompt. Popular AI chatbots include ChatGPT, launched in November 2022; Microsoft Copilot, released in November 2023; and Google Gemini, announced in December 2023. Generative AI chatbots are trained using machine learning and leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate new content.
“AI can be very helpful if you’re using it in a just way. So, if you’re using it to complement your education, it’s good. However, if you’re using it to simply look up answers to questions, and you’re not learning, AI is just doing the work for you, then obviously it’s an issue,” said North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCAT) sophomore Robert Snipes, 19.
While AI has proven to be extremely useful for many teens and their education, AI chatbots can create problems with cheating, overreliance, and, over time, a loss of cognitive abilities among users. “The critical thinking aspect of it is very much lacking, and I find that students [experience] this whole idea of cognitive offloading,” said Dr. Reneau.
According to a 2025 research paper by Frontiers in Psychology, cognitive offloading occurs when external tools, such as AI, are used to perform cognitive tasks. Consequently, the need for active recall and problem-solving decreases, making it harder to think critically when necessary.
Dr. Reneau further explains that AI has emerged rapidly, causing students to struggle with tasks such as problem-solving. However, critical thinking isn’t just relevant in the classroom; the lasting effects of AI chatbots on the mind influence young people in the workforce.
“Because I’m working now, as I’m in school, I’ve learned just how important critical thinking is,” said Snipes. As a marketing major working in brand management, Snipes understands the impact of artificial intelligence on critical thinking.
“When you’re in school, they teach you everything you need to know … However, when you’re working in an actual job, you’re just given a task,” said Snipes, stressing the need to think critically, “So overly using AI can make it very difficult to think critically because you’re just asking AI to do everything.”
In fact, AI is impacting young people in the workforce in many ways. A study by Gallup shows that “47% of college students have given at least a fair amount of consideration to changing their major due to the impact of AI on the job market, while one in six students (16%) say they have actually done so.”
Dr. Chris Green, Chief Technology Officer at ScanTech AI, elaborates on recent graduates entering the workforce. “A big part of, I think, really being able to leverage AI is being a subject matter expert in something yourself. And so when you have a situation when you’re still kind of in these formative stages of learning principles, and you kind of use AI in lieu of actually learning, that could be problematic because what you’re really doing is cheating the system in certain respects.”
Though Dr. Green believes that AI can be useful to students, he cautions that they use it responsibly. A study by Common Sense Media shows that 41% of young people believe that Generative AI will have both positive and negative impacts on their lives in the next 10 years.
However, the negative impacts of artificial intelligence do not mean it can’t be applied in ways that benefit teens.
Snipes claims, “Don’t be afraid to adopt AI for the right reasons. I was one of the people that was skeptical of it, but once I learned how it can actually help me, I started using it, and it’s been very, very helpful. So don’t be afraid to leverage it in the right way.”
