My name is Rémi Crémel, a student at Silicon Valley International School. I started noticing something weird last year after we got our first school computers. Every time a teacher would bring up AI in class, the room would get quiet in a way that felt everyone was holding their breath. Many of my peers use AI daily for essays, math, and more, but I noticed that nobody used to talk about it out loud, because we all kind of assumed we'd get in trouble. The teachers clearly knew something was going on, but they didn't know what, exactly. So they just... banned it. Or ignored it. And that made everything worse.
There was one afternoon where I watched a teacher spend twenty minutes trying to explain why using AI to brainstorm was "cheating" - and I could see in the eyes of half the class that they'd done just that the night before on the assignment she was collecting. Nobody said anything. I didn't say anything. And I remember thinking: this is such a waste. We're all just pretending the thing isn't happening. And the gap between what students actually do and what teachers think students do just keeps getting bigger, without anyone stepping in to ensure AI is applied to its greatest potential.
What I realized is that nobody was trying to fix it from the inside. There are adults writing AI policy for schools - without asking students. There are teachers concerned about trust - without understanding AI's full potential. And, lastly, there are students like me who actually know what's going on, who've seen the use of these tools every day, and we're the ones feeling the dual effect of both bad AI use and unfair blanket bans. We're just not in the conversation at all. I thought: if no one's going to build a bridge between students and teachers on this, maybe I should.
That's what brought me the idea of PeerAI. PeerAI started as a simple idea: what if students could talk honestly about AI without getting punished for it? And what if we turned those conversations into real data that we could actually bring to our teachers and principals and school boards? Not as a complaint, but as information. As a solution. I'm a student myself, so I don't have a lot of credentials. But I do have something most researchers don't - I'm living this in real time, every single day. I think that counts for something. I hope PeerAI becomes the proof that it does.