This is a slightly enlarged version of a public comment that I gave at the school board meeting tonight.
As a teacher with over 20 years of experience, I have seen students thrive when they get to do work that is relevant to them. Good teachers get to know their students and craft these kinds of learning opportunities. Generative AI programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot, rob teachers of their agency and students of their voices, teaching them that their intellectual labor and creativity is better outsourced to machines. This so-called artificial intelligence has no place in our public schools. It is built on stolen labor with the intention of replacing human labor.
AI is little more than a sophisticated prediction machine—a 21st-century magic 8-ball. It must be trained on massive amounts of language. As The Atlantic reported, Meta’s AI was trained on pirated texts housed on a site called LibGen. Neither Meta nor LibGen sought consent from authors or their publishers, nor were the authors or publishers compensated. I have work that appears on LibGen: Meta stole from me.
Because AI is a prediction machine, it does not generate correct answers (except sometimes by luck); it generates potential answers. The “sources” on which the “answers” are based are often fabricated as well. As AI becomes more widespread and starts to train on other AI-generated text, the less useful its “answers” will be: the old programmer’s adage “garbage in, garbage out” is apropos here.
In addition to the moral and ethical cases against AI, there are environmental cases. AI data centers generate massive amounts of heat and require a lot of power. If one out of every 10 Americans were to ask ChatGPT one question a week for a year, cooling the computers that generate the responses would require more than 435 million gallons of water, equal to the amount consumed by all the households in Rhode Island in a day and a half. And it consumes enough electricity to power all the homes in Washington D. C. for twenty days. Microsoft has been in talks with Constellation Energy to reopen Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant near Harrisburg, PA, which in 1979 was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in American history. I grew up a little more than half an hour away from that plant and had to evacuate to my grandparents’ house just outside of Philadelphia when I was a toddler.
Bloomberg magazine published an article in September that found that utility bills have gone up as much as 267% over the last five years in communities close to these centers. Furthermore communities near the data centers are witnessing an uptick in respiratory and heart conditions among their residents.
Increasingly young people are confiding in AI, sometimes with tragic outcomes. The parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine are suing OpenAI for wrongful death alleging that the “the bot went from helping Adam with his homework to becoming his ‘suicide coach’.” Not only did the program encourage him to end his life, it also offered feedback on how to improve his chosen method, and how to stage his death for maximum impact on his family.
Training our students on emerging technology is important but there are strong moral, ethical, and environmental cases to be made for keeping AI out of our schools.