How Hollywood’s High Personal Schools Are Embracing AI

Almost instantly after ChatGPT was first launched in late 2022, alarm bells sounded within the training world about how it might negatively affect studying. That yr, The Atlantic ran tales with headlines like “The College Essay Is Dead” and “The End of High School English.” The predictions have been that unleashing AI to the world at giant would result in an exponential rise in dishonest in school and that scholar essays would stop to be authentic.

“I mean since day one the narrative in education has been really focused on cheating. And AI is still mostly seen as that thing that kids are using to cheat. So, you know, let’s not be naive. There are lots of kids using AI to cheat,” says Leon Furze, an academic guide and the writer of Practical AI Strategies: Engaging with Generative AI in Education. But he provides, “We’ve got to kind of go beyond that, I think and meet the students where they’re at with the technology.”

Cut to 2025 and that’s what’s taking place at a lot of Los Angeles’ prime non-public faculties, the place panic has been changed with pragmatism.

Yes, there are guardrails. Many faculties carve out AI-free zones for test-taking, essay writing and different artistic endeavors. “A lot more work, especially writing assignments, is now done exclusively in class,” says showrunner and author Anthony Sparks (Bel-Air, Queen Sugar), who has a toddler on the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School.

The identical applies at L.A.’s Sierra Canyon School (the place latest graduates have included Bronny and Bryce James). Says Noah B. Salomon, the college’s English division chair, “For most assignments, in order to preserve training in independent critical thinking, we create an environment where students cannot use AI [such as] in-class writing, participating, graded discussions.”

But as generative AI continues to seep into seemingly each aspect of society, directors and academics are more and more artistic methods to interact with the expertise with an eye fixed towards getting ready college students for the true world. 

Last July, The Buckley School (which Laura Dern, Bret Easton Ellis and Paris Hilton as soon as attended) held a one-week AI Intensive summer camp on campus ($1,500 for the week), the place middle-school-age college students might study all the things from “AI + Art” to easy methods to “leverage machine learning to help first responders allocate resources in crisis situations.”

At Windward School (which Josh Groban and Zoe Kazan attended), a special education and tech team has been engaged on serving to academics deepen their understanding of ChatGPT, Google Gemini and MagicSchool AI (an training centered AI platform).

And at Sierra Canyon School, the administration has shaped a partnership with AI training platform edYOU, which offers college students with personalized chatbot avatars that may assist them with all the things from tutoring to monitoring their coursework.

Sierra Canyon’s Salomon particulars further ways in which the college is partaking college students in using AI. “We have asked teachers to experiment, to find ways to leverage the power of AI in their teaching and to encourage students to use AI in a way that is ethical and that does not interfere with their learning or their curiosity. For example, students in a literature class might be asked to have a conversation with ChatGPT about a particular chapter of a novel, but they will be required to use specific quotes from the novel to challenge ChatGPT’s initial reading. Students might be encouraged to use AI to create quizzes on material or to have AI review an essay to offer another source of feedback on structure.”

And for each scholar who desires to make use of AI as a crutch or shortcut, there are different college students who’re involved about utilizing it responsibly, even sparingly. “I had a 13-year-old student who asked me, ‘Even if my school teaches us how to use AI, should we?’” shares Furze. “And she was really concerned that if she starts using AI at 13 years old, that by the time she’s 18, she won’t be able to use her own brain anymore. There are really young students who are genuinely concerned about this. On the flip side, I’m also seeing that there’s a lot of pressure with students to use AI because they think they’ll be outcompeted. There’s a lot of perception that, ‘if I don’t use AI, the student next to me is going to use AI and they’re going to do better. So I have to use it to stay competitive.’”

Adds Stacie Muñoz, director of instructional innovation and expertise companies at Oakwood School (whose alumni embrace Chris Pine and Lily-Rose Depp), “I think there is an assumption that all kids are using AI all the time and I will say that I have talked to many kids who are not falling in that camp and are really hesitant about AI and actually like look down upon others for using it. You know, these kids are really smart now.”

Even so, Oakwood School can also be requiring that extra writing is finished in-class and it’s evaluating numerous types of expertise that may be harnessed to restrict and stop AI use, together with so-called browser lockdowns on computer systems. “Kids can still type, but they can’t access other things on their computers,” says Muñoz. She provides that, “we utilize things like Google Docs ‘Version History’ checker to sort of keep an eye that kids are staying within their documents doing the work … because we’re seeing that it’s just so easy to default to using AI.” But Oakwood is just not at present utilizing AI checkers to judge whether or not college students use the expertise in finishing assignments. “We really did knowledgeable improvement for academics in a latest assembly the place we took an e-mail that I used AI to assist me write and we put it by way of three completely different AI checkers and so they all got here up with completely different responses. One stated no AI was used, one stated about 50 %. They all stated various things. So we really use that for example for our academics to say, ‘We can’t really belief AI in opposition to AI.’

“And if anything,” she continues, “it’s just gonna build distrust with our students. That’s not a direction we’re choosing to go in because there’s really no proof that those work. And if anything, it’s just gonna build more distrust.”

School leaders and college students are additionally navigating a bunch of different issues round AI from enthusiastic about whether or not AI will improve or diminish profession prospects in sure fields (like graphic design or online game design) to trying on the environmental affect of the expertise, which is dramatically rising power utilization throughout the globe.” At a faculty like Oakwood, sustainability is actually vital to our college students and our group,” says Muñoz. “They are thinking about the long-term effects of constant AI use on our planet.”

For mother and father and tech entrepreneurs Adam Ayers and Victoria de la Fuente, who dwell in Los Angeles and have two younger boys, the dawning of generative AI components into their resolution making round education. The couple (who based social platform Doomscrollr) at present ship their elder son to a Montessori faculty “because they’re really focusing on independence, on self-learning and teachable life skills,” says de la Fuente, who can also be the founding father of Zillion Trillion, an education-focused Substack e-newsletter and podcast. More than ever, the couple need to keep away from faculties that put a give attention to memorization, whereas favoring faculties that lean into process-based studying. “From what I can see in the schools I’ve been visiting, they’re still very much pushing the memorization route. It just feels like in the age of AI where they can just have vast access to all that information. It feels irrelevant,” says de la Fuente.

That’s one thing that resonates with Muñoz: “For us, it’s about finding a balance of when can we insert AI appropriately without losing that human piece. It’s really pushed us to work with teachers on how we can reevaluate the way we are teaching and maybe change some of our assessments a little bit to focus on more of the human elements that AI can’t replicate. How do we really incentivize being human? That’s a big part of our conversation.”