Student use of artificial intelligence is a hotly debated topic, and for good reason—a recent study from HEPI, the UK Higher Education Policy Institute, has shown that “The proportion of students using AI to generate text with tools such as ChatGPT has more than doubled from less than a third (30%) to nearly two-thirds (64%)” from 2024 to 2025.

But while students are under fire, educators have yet to be covered in such depth. Educators themselves have a variety of opinions: within Gulf Breeze, teachers range from using AI to generate assignments to avoiding its use in wherever they can. 

Mr. McCauley is one teacher who does use AI.

As he explains, “before grading, I upload the prompt, the rubric and multiple graded papers that are already graded per the rubric.  I then have Carl score a paper that I also grade, and we see if the scores line up.  We almost always are within a point or two. The tricky part is that if I leave a session, I must reupload the rubric, etc.; otherwise, the scores will start to wander.”

Carl is Mr. McCauley’s AI assistant. This brings up the question of exactly how AI feedback tends to be received by students, and fortunately, there are answers. 

In 2025, a study from the Journal of Assessment & Evaluation in Student Education found that AI feedback was considered less relevant (84.6% of respondents), less contextualized (95.2%), less reliable (95.4%), and generally less important by nearly 90% of students. Educator involvement in education was rated consistently better on all of those points, showing that the majority of students trust and value their teachers’ input more than they do an AI’s.

Mr. McCauley’s method can be said to improve quite a few of the issues raised above—namely, the accuracy and contextualization are improved by his provision of a rubric and previously graded papers—but what this does not necessarily rectify is the way students perceive its importance, or even its relevance to them as individuals. This is just one example.

There are many ways to use AI, and there are equally as many benefits as there are consequences, all depending on the application. Some consequences are immutable, though, such as the environmental impact of AI. Artificial intelligence data centers have been proven many times over to have a damaging impact on the environment around them and at large.

For example, these centers can become hotspots for water pollution as mass amounts of “discharge of polluted water and discarded electronic components into rivers, groundwater supplies, landfills, or unregulated recycling facilities results in the hazardous materials gradually seeping into surrounding soil and water systems.

Over time, these substances may infiltrate groundwater, creating serious long-term health concerns, degrading habitats, and endangering communities that rely on those resources,” in the words of a JSTOR Daily contributor.  

She goes on to share that merely training one AI model generates up to five times the carbon emissions of an average car over the course of its lifetime. 

To bring this back to education, the point is that while direct harm within the school environment can be alleviated, harm to the planet carries on nonetheless.

This is one way students can be criticized as well—in fact, as Mr. Lowrey, who teaches dual enrollment English Composition students, brought up, “students use AI far more than [teachers] realize. Teachers have to radically rethink how they teach, and that means more than just making all work be done in class.” 

He’s correct: according to the Digital Education Council, 86% of students use AI in their studies. And this is easily harmful to their education as well. ChatGPT use, according to an MIT study, caused a decrease in critical thinking and an increase in reliance, as “ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.”

It mentions the way responses to essay prompts become homogenized through AI, and some of the same ideas from above can be applied here as well: why should educators find an essay important if it was written by AI? How much does use of artificial intelligence in our education affect our water sources, and the world of our future? 

In the end, regardless of someone’s perspective on AI, it’s a two-way street. If students dislike the way their teachers are using AI, then they need to be mindful of their own use first, and vice versa. AI can easily be detrimental for every user when it comes to education. There are ways to mitigate that, and many of its applications are still being studied.

But, most importantly, it should be kept in mind that AI is just a tool—one that some people choose to use while others do not, both on the side of teachers and students. What this means isn’t that students should bear the blame, nor should educators, but that AI is a field that needs to be traversed with care by all parties.