More than nine out of ten middle and high school students in Seoul have used generative AI, a survey found. According to the report "Study on the Educational Use of Generative AI and Related Demand," released on the 11th by the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education's Education Research and Information Institute, 25,104 of the 26,531 students who responded, or 94.7%, said they had used it. In the same survey, more than 90% of teachers said they were worried about side effects from the use of generative AI. The tool has entered the classroom, and the rules on how to use it lag behind.
Generative AI refers to programs that produce new text, images and audio in response to instructions given by a person. ChatGPT and Gemini were cited as examples of the services students said they used. The survey was conducted in July 2025 among 26,531 students and 3,344 teachers in Seoul. Design information such as how the survey was carried out and what the sampling error was has not been disclosed.
Broken down by school level, the spread is clearer. Among middle school students, 17,845, or 93.8%, and among high school students, 7,259, or 96.7%, said they had used it. Usage rises in the grades under heavier exam pressure. It is hard to view this as a fad confined to certain grades, and it reads as having seeped into school life as a whole.
The occasions for using it cluster around study. Among students with experience using it, 10,674, or 42.5%, said they used it "during class at school," and 8,956, or 35.7%, chose "when studying alone." Those who said they used it to make images, music or videos as a hobby came to 2,191, or 8.7%. That means its use has settled into a device that helps with assignments and classes more than a plaything.
The finding that classroom use is the highest has to be read together with the teachers' responses. Forty-eight percent of teachers said they had no experience of education related to generative AI, and "no time" was cited as the reason. Students use AI during class, and about half of the teachers who design those classes have not gone through related education. Whether that 48% means not having completed training or not having taught students how to use it cannot be distinguished from the report summary alone.
A skew also appeared by subject. Use was active in Korean and English, while it was low in math, art and music. Given that current models perform best on the work of producing and polishing sentences, the distribution is predictable. Specific usage rates by subject were not released, so the size of the gap is hard to gauge.
Here the task that policy has to take on goes beyond distribution. Putting in more devices and accounts is effectively done, and what remains is the design work of deciding which assignments AI may be used for and which assessments it will be barred from, and how students will be made to mark AI use in the work they produce. For teachers to set these standards, training hours and the adjustment of duties that secures those hours have to come together. The answer "no time" points to working conditions more than to individual will.
The 25,104 students in Seoul will open a chatbot window and start their assignments this semester as well. Whether a line sits beside that window telling them what they may ask and what they have to write themselves will make the difference over the next year. The survey showed the current state, and the guidelines now have to be made.
