Group-Differentiated Discourse on Generative AI in High School Education: A Case Study of Reddit Communities

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit discussions on generative AI in high school education, revealing how stakeholder roles influence discourse, emotional responses, and implications for academic integrity enforcement strategies.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of stakeholder perspectives on AI in education using a novel multi-method pipeline and highlights the emotional and pedagogical implications of AI detection tools.

Findings

Teachers articulate explicit pedagogical trade-offs.

Students discuss AI in relation to grades and enforcement.

AI detectors are associated with higher negative emotions.

Abstract

In this paper, we study how different Reddit communities discuss generative AI in high school education, focusing on learning, academic integrity, AI detection, and emotional framing. Using 3,789 posts from five education-related subreddits, we compare student, teacher, and mixed communities using a pipeline that combines keyword retrieval, human-validated relevance filtering, LLM-assisted annotation, and statistical tests of group differences. We find that stakeholder position strongly shapes discourse: teachers are more likely to articulate explicit pedagogical trade-offs, simultaneously framing AI as both beneficial and harmful for learning, whereas students more often discuss AI tactically in relation to accusations, grades, and enforcement. Across all groups, detector-related discourse is associated with significantly higher negative emotion, with larger effects for students and mixed communities than for teachers. These results suggest that AI detectors function not only as contested technical tools but also as governance mechanisms that impose asymmetric emotional burdens on those subject to institutional enforcement. Finally, we argue that detection-based enforcement should not serve as a primary academic-integrity strategy and that process-based assessment offers a fairer alternative for verifying authorship in AI-mediated classrooms.