Half of parents are worried their kids are too hooked on AI

Artificial intelligence really is everywhere these days.

Beyond shaking up workplaces and college classrooms, the tech is gaining ground among grade school students — and it’s making some parents nervous.

Among 1,150 parents of school-aged children surveyed in Deloitte’s annual back-to-school survey, half said they were concerned their child “relies on AI too much.” That usage is outpacing the number of parents who said their child’s school provides approved generative AI tools (22%) or has established guidelines for using the tech (33%).

Nearly 30% of respondents also said their children were already using generative AI tools in their schoolwork.

At the same time, more than a third of parents said they are concerned schools aren’t preparing kids enough with AI skills, with one in eight parents planning to pay for AI tutoring or camps.

The numbers add a new wrinkle to the growing debate over tech tools in schools.

Business Insider’s Katie Notopolous wrote in May about how her third grader and his friends “had been using Google’s Gemini on their school-provided Chromebooks to make funny pictures of poop and dinosaurs.” Several school districts are also balancing a backlash against the widespread use of video resources like YouTube against a yearslong decline in math and reading scores.

One physics teacher in Canada told Business Insider last year that students’ use of AI tools had prompted him to include more analog classwork. “I’ve tried to sort of shift back toward some handwritten assignments, instead of having them do it on the computer,” Ward said. “That way, I can tell this is how they’re writing.