"In San Diego, a high school English teacher can clear her grading queue in a matter of days by outsourcing her initial assessments to ChatGPT. In New Hampshire, middle schoolers use generative tools to strip the clothes off their classmates in digital photographs, leaving the community grasping for a policy response. In Sweden, a payments company touts its AI customer-service system for carrying the work of 700 peopleonly for its CEO to later admit they'd overdone it on automation and would start bringing people back."
"Artificial intelligencecomputer systems trained on vast datasets to predict the next likely pixel or wordis everywhere. In the three years since ChatGPT was released, AI has shifted from a browser-based novelty to a kind of background infrastructure. It is the ears in the exam room, the silent partner in the C-suite, the uncredited co-author of the classroom rubric. The College Board reports that 84 percent of high school students now use AI for schoolwork."
AI has rapidly integrated into everyday institutions, enabling tasks like a high school teacher outsourcing initial grading to ChatGPT and powering automated customer service at scale. Students misuse generative tools to create sexualized images of classmates, creating urgent policy challenges. AI shifted from browser novelty to background infrastructure, operating as an uncredited partner in workplaces and classrooms. Usage and investment have surged: 84 percent of high school students use AI for schoolwork and global AI spending reached $1.8 trillion. Large AI data centers demand enormous electricity—one can equal the consumption of 100,000 homes—underscoring significant environmental and social trade-offs.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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