AI companies know that kids are the future of their business model. The industry has made no secret of its efforts to attract young people to its AI agents through well-timed promotions, discounts, and referral programs. “Here to help you with your exams,” OpenAI said during a ChatGPT Plus promotion for students. Students get free one-year access to expensive AI products from Google and Perplexity. Perplexity even pays $20 for every American student who downloads its AI browser, Comet.
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The popularity of AI tools among teenagers is astronomical. Once the product enters the education system, it is teachers and students who are left with the consequences. Teachers are struggling to keep up with the new ways their students are exploiting the system, and students are at risk of not learning at all, educators warn.
This has become even more automated with the latest AI technology, AI agents, which can complete online tasks for you. These tools make things worse by making it easier to copy. Meanwhile, tech companies play the blame game for how their tools can be used, often simply blaming the students they have empowered with a seemingly unstoppable copying machine.
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Perplexity appears to be solidifying its reputation as a copywriting tool. It ran a Facebook ad in early October that showed a “student” discussing how his “peers” use Comet’s AI agent to do multiple-choice assignments. In another ad posted the same day on the company’s Instagram page, an actor tells students that the browser can take quizzes on their behalf. When a video of a Perplexity agent completing someone’s online assignment surfaced on X, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivasreposted the video, sarcastically saying, “Absolutely don’t do that.”
This fall, shortly after the summer of AI agents, educators began posting videos of these AI agents submitting assignments to their online classes: OpenAI’s ChatGPT creating and submitting a report to Canvas, one of the popular learning management boards. Perplexity’s AI assistant successfully completing a quiz and creating a short report.
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In another video, ChatGPT pretends to be a student in an assignment meant to help classmates get to know each other. “It actually introduced itself as me… so that surprised me,” the video’s creator, college curriculum designer Yun Moh, told The Verge.
