The more students turn to chatbots, the fewer chances they have to develop real-life relationships that can lead to jobs and later success Illustration by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters; iStock During the pandemic, longtime Bay Area college and career counselor Jon Siapno started developing a chatbot that could answer high schoolers’ questions about their future education options. He was using IBM’s question-answering precursor to ChatGPT, Watson, but when generative artificial intelligence became accessible, he knew it was a game-changer. “I thought it would take us maybe two years to build out the questions and answers,” Siapno said. “Back then you had to prewrite everything.” An AI-powered chatbot trained on information about college and careers and designed to mimic human speech meant students at the Making Waves Academy charter school in the East Bay city of Richmond could soon text an AI Copilot to chat about their futures. The idea was that students could get basic questions out of the way — at any hour — before meeting with counselors like Siapno for more targeted conversations. Almost one-quarter of U.S. schools don’t have a single counselor, according to the latest federal data, from the 2021-22 school year. California high schools fare better, but the state’s student-to-counselor ratio when ChatGPT debuted the following year was still 464-to-1, a far cry from the American School Counselor Association’s recommended ratio of 250-to-1. Siapno wasn’t the only one to see generative AI’s potential to scale advising. A flood of bots designed to help people navigate their college and career…AI Chatbots Can Cushion the High School Counselor Shortage — but Are They Bad for Students?