cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1377962/no-ai-until-high-school-nyc-schools-announce-major-classroom-technology-overhaul
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar H. Samuels today announced a moratorium on student-facing generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) use in schools, alongside a new screen time policy, a decision that will impact nearly 600,000 public school students, or two-thirds of the system’s total enrollment. The policy establishes a one-year moratorium, effective in the 2026-2027 school year, on student-facing generative AI for children in 2-K through 8th grade. It also introduces twice-yearly AI critical thinking modules for high schoolers, limited AI pilots for a small number of high school classrooms and age-appropriate screen time restrictions.
Why not at hs as well?
I doubt you can stop a high schooler from using AI if they wanted to.
I mean you can do something’s like not allowing it’s use on campus.
I guess I’m seeing it as just a critical period of mental development as the years before. Its probably the thing that has me the most worried about the whole thing is the drop in any kind of thinking skills among the general population.
I agree with you. Was just playing advocate. I do think if they ban it from HS that will impact kids way of using it, in a good way.
:100:
I just see no way in which the injection of AI into an already crumbling education results in anything resembling “good outcomes”.
You gotta learn to think. It takes time and effort and dedicated practice. And you need space, time and an environment for that.
As bad as this is for grown adults, it seems orders of magnitude worse for kids/ young adults.
Sounds like the general population would need to use more AI.
Thats the rub aint it.
They steal it from you then sell back a cheap imitation.
As problematic as AI is, these students are going to live in a world where it exists. I would much rather live around people who were taught how to use it well and as a tool to aid thinking and understanding rather than a total replacement to thinking. I’m sure it will take years of refining how we teach high schoolers to live around it to get good results, but we have to start somewhere.
Nah, I disagree. Let’s stop normalizing this “AI is here to stay, embrace it or get left behind” rhetoric. That argument only serves the people pushing the technology.
We don’t need AI, and I haven’t seen a compelling argument for supporting it yet. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner this bubble pops, the better.
It’s already pretty integrated in a lot of white collar work.
Honestly? For some tasks it really does seem useful. My wife is in middle management of a tech company in a non tech role. She doesn’t really have much programming experience aside from HTML. She is encouraged to use AI for generating small SQL scripts and such in situations the company would never have, and never did, give dev time for. And certainly they aren’t going to train every middle manager in SQL. They were just manually completed tasks before that took everyone more time as employees had to manually send over certain data every day.
Which, agree with that use or not, that AI use is already pretty integrated into the corporate world on such a basic workflow level, not flashy stuff like creating an app or something, tells me it’s really unlikely it’s going to go away. I think the hype will die down and we’ll see less of the flashy use being pushed by upper management, but that kind of unsexy use by the rank and file? Can’t see why that will go away.
I don’t think the two things are compatible.
They’re not compatible, under the current paradigms. You’re not wrong, imo.
But neither is the commenter you’re replying to.
It ain’t going away, and as it is (in every respect from function to marketing to access) ‘AI’ is currently absolutely poisonous for mental development, no matter the age.
But that’s not inherently married to the way it will always be used.
Imo, the ban should be in place all the way in K-12, for no less than 5 years, and some resources devoted to enable school districts to engage the necessary mechanisms to assess how to marry the use of AI technology into educational use, with an actual thorough process in place to assess how and if it can be done in a manner beneficial to educational goals.
It’s not enough to have a techbro declare it the best thing in the world for learning, a child development psychologist declare it the worst thing to exist, and an education expert sitting between them looking anguished.
They need to all be locked in the same room, metaphorically speaking, and honestly arrive at a form that is meaningfully impactful to student outcomes (if one can be found), before it’s something that schools should attempt to use within the curriculum.