Welcome to the second ever newsletter from Parents for AI Caution! A few weeks ago, I wrote about why I think we’re going to win the battle for against the tech broligarchy.

Since then, I’ve been listening closely to what Kamar Samuels, the new chancellor of NYC public schools, has to say about AI. In town halls across the city, he’s describing parents as “anxious” and “afraid.”

I will tell you that I spend most of my life these days talking to parents about AI—and they aren’t afraid. They’re angry and annoyed, and they feel like their kids are being used as guinea pigs to line the pockets of ed tech companies for products that they themselves admit aren’t that great. Calling them afraid

1. We know that AI is terrible for learning. I’ve been thinking about theory of mind a lot this week (You can read something I wrote here about how good teaching, writing, and editing has to be done by humans).

This week, Dan Meyer, one of the most prominent writers about education and technology, attended the AI education summit hosted by Stanford, and wrote up his findings here. He wrote that: "The triumphalism of 2023 is out. The edtech rapture is no longer just one more model release away. Instead, from the first slide of the Summit above, panelists frequently argued that any learning gains from AI will be contingent on local implementation and just as likely to result in learning losses." (His entire post is worth reading in full, especially, I think, the comparison to the hype over MOOCs). Of course, Googles’ internal documents characterize their work in schools as aiming to create "a pipeline of future users." 

2. We know their goal is to get rid of teachers. In the meantime, Alpha School—you know, the AI “school” that boasts a totally individualized education in under 2 hours a day, treats students like “guinea pigs,” according to a new 404 Media story. The company is developing a dystopian hellscape where they envision using “AI to build an AI-driven education system with ‘no humans in the loop.’” And they’re not keeping it a secret—companies like HMH, that used to bill themselves as “literacy companies,” are not billing themselves as “adaptive learning companies.”

3. We know that these machines aren’t safe. People continue to scream from the rafters about AI and safety. Zoë Hitzig resigned her position at Open AI because of her concern over how the company was using personal information to target ads; Mrinank Sharma, part of Anthropic's safety team, resigned publicly because of concerns over "how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions" - including at Anthropic which he said "constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most."  This Market Watch article has a list of other recent resignations over concerns about the safety of AI.

4 We know the fascist project is to keep us away from each other. But we don’t have to let them! We can build community (like this cool AI skeptics reading group I found, also here on Buttondown!) Andrea Grimes had a great piece in The Flytrap this week about this. I could quote the entire article, but read this bit:

“Are we so miserably lonely and isolated that we are falling in love with AI bots? Or are we miserably lonely and isolated because the fashy broligarchs need us that way—indeed, like us that way—if it means we’re using their shitty tech and propping up their bullshit bubble? … The system built to propagate “AI”—and, importantly, the people who created and stand to benefit most from it, the Vances and the Thiels and the Musks and their whole foul cohort—is intrinsically fascist, authoritarian, and anti-democratic. It is intertwined, politically and essentially, with other right-wing priorities, such as banning abortion, erasing and oppressing trans people, tear-gassing preschoolers, and packing immigrants into concentration camps. The new personhood—personhood for anyone but people—is part and parcel, a program for fascists, capitalists, and doomers. They want us in thrall to the algorithm, scrolling away in driverless taxis lest we get a taco truck recommendation from a cab driver. They are so very threatened by even the smallest prospect of human connection.”

So what are we going to do? We’re going to keep thinking about how to be human. Grab coffee with a friend and go to an in-person anti-ICE meeting in your neighborhood. Fight for each other by paying money to real writers, real artists, real musicians. Show up at town halls and school board meetings and fight for the right for our kids to be taught by human teachers and read whole books, written by humans. Start a PACES of your own—I can help! If you’re in New York, you can come to one of the chancellor’s listening sessions, and sign and share our petition to get to 1000 signatures calling for a moratorium on AI in schools.

Until next time, send me things I should be reading!

Kelly

PACES founder, annoyed, but not afraid, person