Pause AI in BC Schools
@aicaution.ca
We are PACES: Vancouver - Parents for AI Caution in Educational Spaces, a group of parents concerned by the effects of GenAI+chatbots on students. https://aicaution.ca/ Follows are not endorsements.
We will be at the AI Data Centre Town Hall this Saturday, August 8 from 7:30, at the Japanese Hall Auditorium 487 Alexander St If you want to get involved in the fight to keep classrooms for students, not tech, we'd love to see you and chat! events.sfu.ca/event/49619-...
The kind of "AI literacy" offered by tech companies is always how to use AI, not whether you should use it at all.
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 5h ago“Teaching educators about AI is a ‘moral imperative’, said Randi Weingarten, the AFT president.” “And without outside funding, it was a choice between taking big tech’s money or doing nothing, she said.”
Every time someone says that people need "training in AI" I struggle to understand how you train someone to use the "ask me anything, at anytime, for any reason" machine, or why you would need to.
I think about this finding a lot: "Students whose school uses AI for many reasons are more likely to report that they or a friend of theirs has had a back-and-forth conversation with AI, like chatbots, in potentially troubling ways." From @cdt.org's report:
Hand in Hand: Schools’ Embrace of AI Connected to Increased Risks to Students
Artificial intelligence (AI) has continued to alter the educational experiences of teachers, students, and parents during the 2024-25 school year. The frequency and variety of AI uses continues to gro...
cdt.org
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 20h ago“…the researchers found that opening up to chatbots about personal issues made some people feel not better but worse.”
Many students in BC have been told to use chatbots to "generate ideas". Why? Are students ideas not good enough? Is it not worth them going through the hard work to get better at coming up with ideas?
Machine learning is a technique that has been around for a decade. Calling everything "AI" flattens discourse. It aims to conflate chatbots and generative AI with single-purpose tools that have been proven to be useful.
Investigative Journalism Foundation@theijf.org · yesterdayCould AI improve your commute? The City of Vancouver plans to pilot Google’s Green Light program, which uses AI and Google Maps to analyze and make suggestions for improving traffic infrastructure. zurl.co/pMhmc
We went on a shopping trip to Teachers Pay Teachers and looked for classroom materials that appear to have been generated by AI. Here are the strange resources we found.
Education’s version of Etsy may have an AI slop problem
We went on a shopping trip to Teachers Pay Teachers and looked for classroom materials that appear to have been generated by AI. Here are the strange resources we found.
bit.ly
The mindset behind this tweet views schools as places to optimise stuffing facts into kids' heads. Schools are places where future members of society learn how to be compassionate, well-rounded people. Trying to optimise that misses the point entirely. AI has no place in schools.
Every now and then someone takes a run at me along the lines of "I don't understand why you, a scifi writer, don't appreciate 'AI'," and I'm all, motherfucker, it's *because* I'm a science fiction writer I have the positions I have, how many times do we have to fucking yell "torment nexus," my dude
I did a 10k and I only drove the first half
Dr. Jens Foell@jensfoell.de · 2d ago"I used AI and my brain" is the new "I'm neither left nor right"
"criticizing AI use in journalism or other creative industries is classist" NO IT IS NOT there is a class that benefits enormously from cognitive surrender, epistemic warfare, and the enclosure of all hitherto produced culture and it is NOT THE WORKING CLASS
Yet another example that fails to mention the scientific studies that show: · Students who use "AI" (chatbots, LLMs) learn less. · Students who use chatbots find it takes more effort to talk to humans.
Edutopia@edutopia.org · 2d agoGetting everyone on the same page about AI takes clear policies and shared language. Here’s how to get started. ⬇️ #EduSkyAI #EduSky
38 days until schools starts. We need a moratorium on AI in schools. Here's why. @climatefamsnyc.bsky.social @comixaction.com @gregpak.net
A DoorDash Dot robot stopped directly in front of an emergency vehicle w sirens: W Broadway Rd at Valencia, Mesa, Arizona fwiw, this is very typical robot behavior. AFAIK, all the sidewalk robots struggle w sirens and of course so do the better equipped Waymo robots. OP: tiktok.jay_j205
When schools make school-approved chatbots available to students, who is responsible when students use them for emotional support? Do schools have access to all the logs? Who is responsible for checking the logs? What happens if, like Tumbler Ridge, the student is asking about something dangerous?
Education Week@edweek.org · last wk.Most Kids Use AI Chatbots, Some Seeking Advice on Sensitive Topics: A new survey of young people highlights how they use AI chatbots and their experience with deepfakes.
Students' lives and educational outcomes are not improved by adding more tech. Parents are wising up to this and opting out. www.505omatic.com/after-parent...
After Parent Backlash, Santa Fe Schools Hit Pause on AI Reading Tool That Records Student Voices
Amira, the state-mandated AI reading screener, recorded K–3 students’ voices for two years, and parents say they were never told. At the Thursday, July 30, 2026 board meeting, Superintendent Christine...
505omatic.com
AI is not a truth engine and cognitive surrender is real. Once AI delivers a load of slop it becomes difficult to do the work yourself. The AI already 'did it.' I don't want to read a multidimensional average of the internet's tokens. If you aren't speaking using your voice, I no longer care
This sentiment comes up again and again. Engineers getting skinner-box addiction to chatbot-based coding. "Just one more prompt and it might fix the problem!" Is this really what we want in classrooms?
Mike Riverso@mikeriverso.bsky.social · 5d agoThis is exactly how people talk about gambling and drinking.
!["I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I've been getting from interacting with LLMs-with doing more and more and more and more-is not healthy for me or good for the world," said Green. "It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this. I was talking about this with [my wife] last night, and she did not pull any punches. Frankly, neither did [my brother]. Neither of them think I've been being healthy. I need to readjust."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:pytxycyhu6ql3flqs2qmkuub/bafkreicmxurcds4n55kttsu4q7lglli5tmelaerxppn4gc5ruutlkdqrvq)
The BC government updated part of their "Look West" strategy document with text on AI in schools. It is extremely disappointing. They mention setting up committee to "explore integration of AI platforms" and "encourage early exposure and skills development" in K-12. www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/...
At this point I consider any article that covers this story without also mentioning that these specific turbines power the paid tier of Claude, the vibe coding tool Cursor and (soon) Gemini Enterprise, to be distorting the truth.
Canada's most recent public survey on AI is basically: "How great do you think AI is?" a) Revolutionary b) Super-duper very good c) Fantastic d) Amazing e) Great
Next Thursday August 6, we will be at False Creek Farmers Market from 3~7pm. We should have pin buttons! If you're a local parent, teacher or anyone really, we'd love to chat! aicaution.ca/events/
Really important to note that in no way shape or form did Anthropic’s models in this incident “escape containment,” and not just in the word-policing sort of way. The model stumbled through an open, misconfigured gap. From Anthropic’s incident report:
"Students anted to know what their classmates thought rather than what a large language model produced; they wanted to wrestle with difficult readings+complex ideas. They didn’t want to outsource any of this effort to gen AI. They wanted to do the work.” www.insidehighered.com/opinion/care...
Students as Conscientious Objectors to Gen AI (opinion)
We should listen to them—and treat their objections with respect.
insidehighered.com
It's alarming but somehow blameless behaviours all the way down with US generative AI, and everyone just lets them carry on. Is it causing murder-suicides? Yes. Does it regularly create psychosis? Yes. Is it wrong a lot? Yes. Is it degrading both work and output? Yes. Will it kill us? Yes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Reuters@reuters.com · 6d agoAnthropic says Claude AI hacked three companies during cyber tests reut.rs/4yP1TnF
AI is often presented as inevitable. Yet the infrastructure behind it still depends on local planning, water supplies, electricity grids and politics. Those decisions remain contestable. Zeewolde, Cerrillos, New Brunswick — were all stopped by regular people who found out in time, and showed up.
The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Spreading Globally
One of the clearest victories happened in a Dutch town that few people outside the Netherlands had heard of before 2021.
buff.ly
This quoted short thread that contains many of the problems with LLMs used in academia and writing in general: 1. Authors are ethically obliged to disclose if they used an LLM to make something. If they consulted some source or tool and don't acknowledge it, that's plagiarism.
University of British Columbia "excited to announce" that they are dropping support for human note-takers for students who need assistance, and instead going with genAI that hallucinates plausible but incorrect results. techenemy.com/a/3mrrhqx6fi...
