High School Students Wrestle With AI's Real Cost
Ottawa teens grapple with ChatGPT as a creative crutch, worried schools aren't preparing them for a future where the technology is unavoidable.
Walk into any Ottawa high school and you'll hear students call ChatGPT a friend. But Laya Piché, a Grade 11 student at Collège catholique Franco-Ouest, sees something darker: a thinking replacement that's sapped her motivation to write.
"It's enabled me to be lazier," she says. "With my creative writing, I'm just demotivated to work on things."
Piché isn't alone. A KPMG survey found that 7 in 10 Canadian students now use AI in schoolwork, and half report their critical thinking skills have deteriorated since they started. Nearly 8 in 10 want schools to teach them how to use it ethically—a plea that's colliding headlong with how most teachers are handling the crisis: banning it outright, even as students watch their instructors use ChatGPT on classroom projectors.
The contradiction isn't lost on Grade 10 student Isabelle Craft at Glebe Collegiate. She watches teachers rail against the technology while keeping it in their browser tabs. "It's not fair," she says. "We thought these teachers were against using it at all."
The real divide lies deeper: students fear avoiding AI altogether will leave them unprepared for university and work, where the technology is already embedded. Schools, meanwhile, are trapped between preventing cheating and teaching a skill they don't fully understand themselves. Teachers at École secondaire publique de la Salle like Alexandre French are trying to thread the needle with "AI in the classroom" committees and honest conversations about work ethics. But they're outliers.
Dr. Howard Bernstein, a child psychologist in Oakville, sees the ripple effects in his clinic. Anxiety diagnoses in young people have jumped from 5 per cent to over 50 per cent in recent years. Social media, the inability to write, and now an over-reliance on AI have created a perfect storm of young people feeling powerless over their own futures.
The irony is sharp: students are being punished for using a tool they know they'll need, in a system too rigid to teach them how to use it well.