It depends (of course)!
As an engineer myself, I recognize that Artificial Intelligence as the latest and most prominent tech solution of our time was developed by engineers like myself and holds great promise to solve a variety of different kinds of problems, including in math education. However, there’s also a big risk in such technology being abused.
I’ve already heard directly from high school students who said they’ve used it to write papers for English class. I had someone comment on a SAT math video on our YouTube page saying that they’d solved the problem using an AI tool. Cool? Sure. Convenient? Definitely. Helpful? No, or at least not in this way.
At the end of the day, aside from the obvious moral component of submitting your own work, I believe that AI and other tech work best when they help you as the individual to develop your own mental faculties. Sure, you can get a computer to do your work these days. But when test-time comes, you’re probably not going to do so well. Also, being able to solve problems in math class, even if you don’t use the quadratic formula or take derivatives later in life, sharpens your intellect and ability to solve all kinds of problems in life.
My advice: If you use AI for math help, use it to help fill in gaps in your understanding of the material. For example, if you’ve forgotten a step in solving a particular type of math problem, using AI could be great in that situation. However, I encourage students to not use technology as a substitute for learning it themselves. Learning is not just for a grade; learning develops your mind and helps you become a problem solver.
At the end of the day, remember that it was the human brain that created AI.
