Are We Becoming Too Dependent on AI?

By Anlys Matos — Eleventh Grade

If artificial intelligence can write your essays, summarize your homework, generate your art,

and answer nearly any question you type into it, what happens when an entire generation

stops practicing the skills AI can already do for them? That's not a hypothetical worry

anymore — it's the actual shape of the debate happening in classrooms and universities

right now, including in the Dominican Republic.

AI is changing how people access information, not just what they can produce.

The headline risk of generative AI usually gets framed as "it can write things for you." The

deeper shift is quieter: AI is changing how people find, evaluate, and trust information in the

first place — which means it's also changing how people make decisions, from what to

believe in an argument to how to solve a problem they've never seen before. That shift

brings real, well-documented risks alongside it: AI systems can produce confident-sounding

but false information (often called hallucination), can carry the biases of the data they were

trained on, and have made deepfakes and misinformation dramatically easier to produce

convincingly.

Two students, two very different starting points:

Here's the question that turns this from an abstract debate into a real equity issue: does AI

automatically make things more equal, or does it widen gaps that already exist?

Picture two students working on the same assignment. One has high-speed home internet,

access to paid AI tools, a reliable laptop, and has already been taught how to use AI critically

— checking its answers, using it to brainstorm rather than to replace their own thinking. The

other has none of that. AI hasn't closed the gap between them. It's created a new layer on

top of the old one: not just "who has a computer," but "who has been taught to use the most

powerful new tool well, and who's been left to figure it out alone, or left out entirely."

The Dominican Republic is living this gap right now:

This isn't speculative for Dominican students — the numbers are current and specific. The

government's 2025 ENHOGAR household survey found that just over half of Dominican

households now have internet access nationally, but that headline figure hides a sharp

divide: internet reaches more than 70% of urban households, compared to barely 30% in

rural communities. Higher-income households have nearly universal access, while

lower-income households often rely on limited mobile data plans that constrain what they

can actually do online — a very different experience from stable home broadband when it

comes to using AI tools that require consistent, fast connections.

Separate OECD research on Latin American education technology found that more than

one-third of Dominican students lack access to the internet or computers at all — whether

through school or at home — a gap that predates the AI conversation entirely and shapes

who can even participate in it.

At the same time, momentum toward AI adoption is real and moving fast at the institutional

level. In August 2026, the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) announced

new partnerships and strategies to expand AI integration into education and multiply

technical training opportunities nationwide, coordinating with the Instituto Tecnológico de las

Américas (ITLA) to strengthen STEM access. The Dominican Republic has also positioned

itself regionally on AI infrastructure, including a 2023 memorandum with Chile and Latin

America's CAF development bank to explore building high-performance computing centers.

The ambition is there. Whether the connectivity gap closes fast enough to let all Dominican

students benefit from it — not just students in Santo Domingo with reliable broadband — is

the open question.

Teachers everywhere are wrestling with a version of the same problem: AI tools can make

learning more adaptive and accessible — adjusting to a student's pace, offering instant

feedback, translating material — while simultaneously making it easier than ever to skip the

actual thinking a task was designed to build. Researchers studying AI in education have

specifically flagged that if these tools mainly benefit already-privileged students who have

the connectivity, guidance, and prior skills to use them well, the technology doesn't close

educational gaps — it can compound them.

The answer isn't "stop using AI"

That's the easy, unhelpful conclusion. A more useful framing: learn how to use AI without

surrendering your ability to think. In practice, for a student, that looks like specific habits

rather than a blanket rule:

● Using AI to check your own reasoning after you've worked through a problem, not

instead of working through it

● Treating AI output as a first draft or starting point to verify, not a finished, trustworthy

answer

● Learning to spot when AI is likely to be wrong — dense factual claims, specific

statistics, anything it has no way to verify

● Advocating, at the school and community level, for the connectivity and training that

make "using AI well" possible for every student, not just students whose families can

already afford good internet and updated devices

The Dominican Republic's own numbers make the stakes concrete: a national AI education

push means very little for a rural student without reliable internet. Closing that access gap

isn't a side issue to the AI conversation — for a country in the Dominican Republic's position,

it may be the actual first chapter of it.

Works cited

● Dominican Today, "Innovation: More than half of Dominican households now

have internet access, but significant disparities remain" (ENHOGAR 2025

survey)

● OECD, "Making the Most of Technology for Learning and Training in Latin

America" (digital divide in education)

● Infobae, "La apuesta educativa por la inteligencia artificial en República

Dominicana enfrenta un reto: sostener la infraestructura" (2026)

● International Science Council, "AI Paper Case Study: Dominican Republic —

ENIA: a roadmap for creating a knowledge economy"

● UNDP, "Missed Connections: An incomplete digital revolution in Latin America

and the Caribbean"

● Frontiers in Computer Science, "AI and the digital divide in education" (2026)