The em dash used to be my favorite punctuation mark. Something about it spoke to me — its versatility, the way it can add emphasis or connect thoughts, the spark of personality it brings to sentence structure.
Unfortunately, this all came to a crashing halt with the rise of artificial intelligence. I would, after all, rather forgo the em dash than find myself accused of cheating.
The em dash has become one of the telltale signs people associate with AI-generated writing. ChatGPT and other large language models have seemingly adopted it as their mascot. A beloved punctuation mark used by writers since medieval times now earns nothing but suspicion.
This is a small example of a much larger problem.
Artificial intelligence has embedded itself in the academic experience of high school students across the world, becoming a ubiquitous resource for homework, writing, and thinking itself. Why stress your brain solving a problem when your dear friend “Chat” can do it for you in a fraction of the time? Everyone wants easy solutions, and AI seems to ask for nothing in return for providing them.
Nothing, that is, except the occasional sacrifice of independent thought.
Schools are struggling to implement systems that prevent dishonest AI use. Last year, those efforts transformed my school’s traditional history research paper project. Instead of submitting a few intermittent rough drafts, we were assigned a dozen checkpoints, while our teacher promised to inspect timestamps for evidence that no large chunks of text had been pasted into the document.
I understand the intent. Teachers don’t want to read twenty essays all developed by the same AI model. These falsified assignments are not only immoral; they leave teachers with no way to identify areas for improvement, and students remain woefully unprepared for environments in which AI is unavailable. A child will never learn to swim while clutching a flotation device.
That doesn’t mean I don’t understand the value of AI. Ignoring a technology that will surely shape the future of human advancement would be ignorant and damaging in its own right. AI is excellent at explaining difficult concepts from a new perspective, identifying subpar areas of an essay, or condensing excessive information into main ideas. The crucial distinction is whether AI is a tool for aiding understanding, or a tool for thinking itself.
That distinction feels especially important to me and my fellow high school seniors, as we consider our plans for college and beyond. AI has the capacity to replace an untold number of professions in the coming decades — or so we are told — and already we are being advised to avoid certain fields of study. As an aspiring writer, I am particularly worried that human writing will become obsolete in the wake of AI’s ability to generate such quick and easy content.
But I find hope every time I pick up a book and remember that writing isn’t simply about grammatically correct sentences. It isn’t about arranging words into a falsehood of professionalism. Writing has the capacity to capture tragedy, and love, and the feeling of watching raindrops trickle down a car window, and the sensation of laughing so hard you can’t breathe. There is an inherently human element in enabling words to encapsulate the beauty and pain of existence.
I don’t believe AI will ever be able to replicate that.
And if it eventually does, I hope our society will understand that we’ve lost something essential. I hope we’ll all be wise enough to write our own stories anyway, because it will always matter that there is a person behind the words.
That belief is central to how I think we should approach AI in schools — with a focus on personal responsibility. Perhaps my history teacher was justified in making us jump through hoops to prove our academic honesty, but I don’t think his efforts were successful. Those students devoted to avoiding work found ways to do so anyway, and the rest of us suffered for the increased oversight.
So many today believe in preventing AI use by making students physically unable to access it, but this goal can only accomplish so much. Trying to block or eliminate something has rarely stopped people from getting it — especially when it comes to the famously cunning, indignant species that is teenagers.
This doesn’t mean abandoning standards. We still need in-class essays, handwritten or supervised writing, math tests, exams, and other assessments completed without internet access so that a student’s true skills can be measured. But trying to enforce a total absence of AI in independent home assignments is impossible.
Instead, we should educate teenagers on all the tools at their disposal, including AI, and let them make their own mistakes. Society is supposed to be training high schoolers to become adults, yet tries to handle us like small children clutching a precious crystal vase when it comes to artificial intelligence. Sometimes teenagers will make irresponsible decisions. Occasionally, we will act immorally. Making mistakes, and learning from the consequences, is an essential aspect of growing up. AI is just the latest manifestation of this.
Younger children are a different story. I don’t think elementary or middle school students need unrestricted access to AI. Before children are given a tool capable of answering every question for them, they need to learn how to ask the right questions, struggle through difficult problems, and discover they are capable of figuring things out themselves.
But by high school, complete prohibition is the last thing students need. Teach students what AI can do. Teach them what it cannot do. Explain why copying an AI-generated essay is academically dishonest, and why it’s intellectually harmful, and then — outside the classroom — leave us alone.
Because eventually, we are going to graduate.
We will leave classrooms where teachers can see our screens and enter a world where AI is simply another tool available to us. Professors, employers, writers, scientists, and politicians will use it. I know that I will, too.
So I hope our society can cease this witch hunt for all things AI, and understand that for all its downsides, it remains an extraordinary tool for intellectual and societal advancement, if taught responsibly and without stigma.
And I hope, too, that we can learn to let me keep my favorite thing — em dashes — before this sentence gets me accused of using AI.