dailyloe.com – Jessica Winter, a columnist for The New Yorker, wrote about her concerns regarding artificial intelligence in K-12 education. She stated that she does not like A.I. and is raising her children not to like it. Winter has told her children for years that chatbots are manipulative and dangerous. She also said that A.I.-image generators are loosening the collective grip on reality.
Winter described large language models as built atop industrial-scale intellectual-property theft. She compared speaking with her kids about A.I. to discussing a creepy neighbor. She advised them to avoid eye contact and cross the street when walking past his house. She said she was not prepared for the creepy neighbor to start hanging around her kids’ schools.
In February, Winter’s son, a third-grader at a public K-5 in Massachusetts, brought home a certificate. The certificate read “Certificate of Completion” for “demonstrating an understanding of the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence.” He earned this honor by playing a computer game called Mix & Move with AI. The game was produced by the nonprofit Code.org in partnership with Amazon Future Engineer.
In the game, the student designs a cartoon dancer and remixes a popular song available on Amazon Music. Winter described the game as an inane drag-and-drop affair that has little to do with A.I. She said the certificate was merely a memento of a pointless and deceptive branding exercise. In March, students at her eleven-year-old daughter’s public middle school began receiving new Google Chromebooks.
The Chromebooks came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. Winter’s daughter, a sixth-grader, gets a prompt when she begins writing an essay: “Help me write.” If she starts work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist with prompts like “Help me edit” and “Beautify this slide.”
Winter noted that the image generator is there if her daughter ever wishes to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is also present on the device. Winter expressed surprise that A.I. tools had entered her children’s schools so early. She had thought they would have until high school before facing such technology.
