Artificial intelligence is truly everywhere these days.
In addition to impacting workplaces and university classrooms, this technology is also making its way among elementary school students, worrying some parents.
between 1,150 Half of parents of school-age children surveyed by Deloitte in its annual back-to-school survey said they were concerned that their children were “too reliant on AI.”
This usage rate exceeds the number of parents who say their child’s school offers approved generative AI tools (22%) or has established guidelines for the use of the technology (33%).
Additionally, nearly 30% of respondents said their children were already using generative AI tools for schoolwork.
At the same time, more than a third of parents said they were concerned that schools were not equipping their children with enough AI skills, and one in eight parents said they planned to pay for AI tutoring or camps.
The numbers add new ripples to the growing debate over technology tools in schools.
Business Insider’s Katie Notopolous wrote in May about how a third-grader and her friends were “using Google’s Gemini on school-provided Chromebooks to take funny pictures of poop and dinosaurs.”
Some school districts are also balancing a backlash against the proliferation of video resources like YouTube with years of declining performance in math and reading.
A Canadian physics teacher told Business Insider last year that his students’ use of AI tools has led him to include more analog lessons.
“I’ve been trying to move back a little bit to handwritten assignments instead of having them do assignments on the computer,” Ward said. “Then you can see this is how they write it. You know it’s theirs.”