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Editor’s note: The intersections of art and education are often overlooked. The
Seattle Times will periodically publish pieces by young people in
Washington about their perspectives on these subjects.
Chatbots powered by large language models became commercially available when I was in eighth grade, and they spread through my middle school like a disease.
Tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini were peddled by disillusioned classmates as a way to escape the monotonous slog of repetitive worksheets and essays. Throughout high school, I saw my peers rely on LLM-powered chatbots for every class, generating essays, solutions to math problems, lab reports and so on.
Now, generative AI has continued encroaching further into the classroom, with teachers themselves encouraging the use of AI and many students opting for AI as the first choice in completing their assignments.
According to research from the College Board, around 84% of students use AI academically. Unfortunately, my high school experience corroborates that. I once participated in a Socratic seminar where a fellow student had an AI chatbot pre-generate their discussion points and questions for them.
To me, one of the most powerful and profound manifestations of the human condition lies in the pursuit of knowledge. Why is it, then, that our society is so fixated on generative AI, mimetic replacements that can think and learn for us?
Our education system’s standardized testing and Advanced Placement classes favor memorization and short, snappy “correct” answers over creative or thought-out answers. The proliferation of AI is hardly surprising then, as we have created the perfect environment for these machines. Engines vomit factually correct text but are bland beyond that, dressed up in purple prose.
Jubilee Fong, a senior at Newport High School, said despite being aware of the environmental concerns of AI data centers, she found herself wishing that it could give even more “personal anecdotes” and tailored responses, adding that it was “hard for [her] to process assignments” without the assistance of AI engines. “Others just use AI to cheat on homework,” Fong said, lamenting AI has “caused people to not try new things.”
And Fong is not alone; many students are aware of the issues surrounding AI, but feel an increasing pressure to use it in the face of mounting academic pressure and monotony.
Not all hope is lost, however — I’ve been in one class, and only one class, with a near-zero rate of AI usage, AP Art History.
Unlike my other classes, art history has fundamentally changed the way I think about my own education. My favorite assignments in that class were museum papers: We would go to the Seattle Art Museum and write reflections on and interpretations of our favorite paintings, how they connected to us, how they made us feel, the iconography, and their paradigms. It was the first time I felt as if my education involved my personhood and my own conclusions instead of a predetermined answer.
Art and humanities, when taught properly, have no correct answer. There are millions of different ways to interpret the same painting or artwork, and that class developed my ability to think critically: Why did the artist do that? What could this mean? How do I relate to this? What issues are the artists trying to address? Perhaps more importantly, that class imparted me with a lucid, personal genre of intellectual engagement that I still treasure to this day.
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To experience the same wonder I did, Seattle is simply rife with opportunities for teens to see art for low to no cost.
The Henry Art Gallery and the Frye Art Museum are both free to all visitors. The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture offers a beautiful collection of Indigenous works and is free every first Thursday. Get out there, go see art and think critically before you can’t think at all!
This essay was written for The Seattle Times through the TeenTix Press Corps, a teen arts journalism program sponsored by TeenTix, a youth empowerment and arts access nonprofit organization.
