How AI is Affecting Education

Last updated on October 1, 2025

Education is about more than just getting a diploma — it’s about developing critical thinking and social skills that will last a lifetime, in and out of the classroom. 

That’s why for centuries, schools haven’t just fed students facts for jobs—they have challenged students to think for themselves.

Sure, past innovations like the calculator let us focus on more complex concepts, but AI is different. It doesn’t replace one level of learning so we can move on to the next; it is a substitute for thinking itself.

With such an all-encompassing tool, it’s hard-wired in us as humans to take this easy way out. But we don’t learn by clicking a button to conjure up information. We learn through a struggle and challenge, when we rack our brains to make connections. 

Educators understand this reality. Only 6 percent of American teachers believe the benefits of AI outweigh the harms, since they know AI will quote “swallow” the educational process. 

For starters, AI eliminates the need for students to think critically. When AI replaces a student’s thinking, students lose confidence in their own creative and reasoning abilities, ending up settling for what’s in front of them. Students themselves have said that once they saw the AI’s ideas, they struggled doing their own brainstorming.

So yes, students can turn in their assignment and get that A, but at what cost? According to a comprehensive data analysis from experts across 5 countries, AI has led to a 27% loss of critical thinking capabilities.

What’s more, AI has spiked academic dishonesty. An AI cheating crisis has swept education, in which students feel that the only way to keep up with their peers and succeed in school is to use AI.

Cheating has of course existed in the past, but it’s only worsened. Half of students said it was easier to cheat than the year prior, thanks to AI. 

And the result? Undermining academic integrity and the very purpose of an education. 89 percent of students used AI for homework, 48 percent for home tests, and 53 percent for writing an essay, letting the AI do their thinking. 

So when students blindly trust AI to do their own work, they don’t even get the facts right. Although AI may sound confident, it lacks the reasoning to check if what it says is correct or not. 

Moreover, since AI is becoming so common, as AI companies scour the web for new data to train their models, they’re likely to ingest some of their own AI-generated content, an unreliable source to begin with. Thus, even the most up to date models have high hallucination rates.

Unfortunately, since AI writes as if it knows what it’s saying, students today are vulnerable to trusting information that is more likely to be false than true. 

Ultimately, when students rely on AI to do their thinking, pass it off as their own work in class, and don’t even realize they’re citing the wrong information, not only do they lose out on critical thinking skills, but our society suffers too. As things like nursing exams, cybersecurity certifications, or social work degrees become increasingly completed online, a person who skirts by using AI poses a serious risk to public safety and the integrity of essential professions.