John P. Stevens High School manufactures college-ready students. My years at JP Stevens have confirmed this to me; despite occasional troubles, JP boasts an admirable work ethic, a motivated and collaborative class, and, most interestingly, a resourceful group of students each year. 

Some engineer creative approaches to student problems, like GradeScout, to manipulate Genesis and plan and calculate the grades they vie for; some take advantage of digital resources such as Quizlet and Canva to adhere to class expectations; so, it’s no surprise most have concerned themselves with AI.

To dismiss Artificial Intelligence as a “blemish to education” and the “naissance of cognitive decline” is somewhat ignorant and a disservice to the advancement of useful technology. But as “college-ready” students, JP students must understand what this type of technology expects of them, especially under that title. By wielding fast passes through higher education with our college courses offered at JP, a larger concern remains at play.

With the AI-boom in all fields, what makes a person valued in the work field or academia? More so, how do we prevent ourselves from becoming “AI Slop”: low-quality, depthless individuals?

While not always explicitly addressed, Artificial Intelligence persists as an issue for all students. For those who look beyond college applications, work fields have slowly adopted AI, and job displacements are estimated to persist at 6-7% (https://www.goldmansachs.com/). And for those simply concerned with college: the evolution of modern technology, the job market, and the needs of society lead colleges and universities to expect unique applicants who can buoy through these tides yet act appropriately. 

AI harnesses the power of thousands and thousands of databases, able to source specific data and calculate at astonishing speeds. So, clearly, a man would not be valued by their ability to memorize. But there is a loophole. AI might memorize, but it cannot understand.

It cannot web outwards in knowledge and depth, and build a more erratic line of reasoning that may be necessary to solve complex problems. While most AIs have tried to replicate human thought through neural networks – where it is easily observable how one topic, such as feminism, has a strong correlation with the 19th amendment – to work efficiently, it takes the “easy way out.” The rigid thought process, often associated with cubicle 9-to-5 workspaces, is the cornerstone of AI’s strength and ultimately its weakness. 

Its efficiency sacrifices the needed risk and danger in research, the danger of spending time to learn, and biasing certain information. No amount of AI could have determined that Thomas Edison’s filament to light his lightbulb would be carbonized bamboo over rock candy. The absurdity, biased and beautiful, remains absolutely human. If anything, AI is powered by this creativity and the venture for it.

Non-consensually, thousands of pages of art have been scraped and continue to get scraped by Instagram and other social media platforms to better leverage their AI to produce original content. But they refuse to feed AI’s images back to AI at risk of it worsening.

So AI is reduced to slop without ingenuity, a gluttony to the lack of reason. AI cannot replace humans, because it’s not human. It lacks the pivotal need to reason, to conclude on understood, not memorized, logic and pathways. 

It is an extension, as all technology remains, a tool to be used. But if we fail to harbor it appropriately, if we fail to understand the extent to which we can ask it to extend, we too become an extension of AI slop. 

Unlike AI, we understand our limits. Where AI gains confidence in topics it clearly does not know, we can backtrack and appropriately maneuver through them to success. 

In research conducted by the European Broadcasting Union in collaboration with the BBC in 2025, this year, 31% of the most popular AI agents distributed hallucinated, unverifiable sources (https://www.ebu.ch/). By citing these sources and putting our ethos behind solely ChatGPT and other agents, without the necessary cross-verification, we encourage the spread of misinformation, which is unacceptable in academic spaces where crucial information is relied on by hundreds. 

But a more concerning issue also remains, that failure to understand concepts from the core classes we partake in now eliminates students’ opportunity to understand the root of their conceptual understanding. Students become dependent on these linear lines of reasoning to construe all roads to all problems; even when not optimal, even when they are wrong, with no opportunity to backtrack and delineate.

To JP students, the beaconers of efficiency and optimizers of college applications- I give you the recipe for becoming AI:

1. Take a curious individual 
2. Push them into lump sums of data 
3. Tell them to use information as jumping blocks instead of engaging and exploring it
4. Expect them to obsess over solutions rather than find satisfaction in an imperfect answer
5. Position that as perfection and survival in a competitive world 

The fear of machines replacing human, skilled labor is nothing new. Notably, in the early 19th century, textile workers known as Luddites protested the automation of looms, fearing their skills would become obsolete. In this age of Artificial Intelligence, and undoubtedly with the other technological breakthroughs that will follow, this same fervor lashes out: fear that booms bring ends and the primal instinct for fight or flight to survive.

The toxicity of narrow-mindedness in high school today brings greater danger than ever before. If we fight a machine on being a machine, the machine will win. But, can it win the war of being human: the homo sapiens, the wise men?

But, survival – keeping up with the inevitable advancement of technology – does not mean sacrificing the present. As writer and historian Brian Merchant notes: ‘Technology doesn’t just arrive; we design it. We can choose how it’s built, how it’s used, and who it benefits.’

Acknowledge the benefits of AI without it infringing on your education; recognize the limits of AI and the opportunity you have to mess up. 

Consume information with intent. And be a little crazy. You’re allowed to be human. And as AI continues to scrape, remember AI wishes to be.