The message from the White House\u2014and, often, from tech companies and public schools\u2014is that Figure 03 and its A.I. militia are irreversibly here, and belong everywhere, and we should feel terrified but also \u201cempowered,\u201d and that the more time and resources we hand over to them the less they will hurt us, hopefully, maybe. Last month, New York City\u2019s Department of Education began soliciting public feedback on its preliminary guidelines for using A.I. in K-12 classrooms, which include this admonishment: \u201cThe question is not whether AI belongs in schools. The question is whether we will collectively build a system that governs AI to serve every student and every stakeholder.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s quite the rhetorical suplex\u2014opening a debate by declaring its central premise off limits. But, as we know from hallucinating chatbots, saying something doesn\u2019t make it so. Countless studies have sown doubt about the place of A.I. in pedagogical settings. \u201cThe integration of LLMs into learning environments,\u201d a 2025 study out of M.I.T. cautioned, \u201cmay inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy.\u201d (The authors appended an F.A.Q. to the paper with instructions on how to discuss its findings: \u201cPlease do not use the words like \u2018stupid\u2019, \u2018dumb\u2019, \u2018brain rot\u2019, \u2018harm\u2019, \u2018damage\u2019, \u2018brain damage\u2019, \u2018passivity\u2019, \u2018trimming\u2019 and so on.\u201d)<\/p>\n
More recently, Education Week published findings from an analysis of data from some thirteen hundred U.S. school districts, which found that about one in five student interactions with generative A.I. \u201cinvolved cheating, self-harm, bullying, and other problematic behaviors.\u201d This month, a study by researchers from M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon, U.C.L.A., and the University of Oxford showed that people who used L.L.M.s on fraction-solving math problems and then lost access to A.I. assistance \u201cperform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. . . . These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.\u201d (This research has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.) And, at the start of the year, the Brookings Institution released a \u201cpremortem on AI and children\u2019s education,\u201d which paired analysis of about four hundred research studies with hundreds of interviews with students, parents, educators, and technologists, and concluded that A.I. tools \u201cundermine children\u2019s foundational development.\u201d<\/p>\n
The main arguments against the use of generative A.I. in children\u2019s education are threefold. The first is that L.L.M.s encourage cognitive offloading before kids have done much cognitive onloading\u2014that is, if these tools cause atrophy of thought in adults, then we can scarcely overestimate the potential effects on a brain that has not developed those cognitive muscles in the first place.<\/p>\n
The second is that chatbots, which mimic emotional intimacy and tend toward sycophancy, warp how children forge their selfhood and relationships. Around age ten or eleven, kids are \u201csuddenly developing more sophisticated relationships and social hierarchies,\u201d Mitch Prinstein, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. \u201cA lot of that can be traced back to surging oxytocin and dopamine receptors. Oxytocin makes us want to bond with peers, and dopamine makes it feel good when we get positive feedback.\u201d When a fawning L.L.M. enters the chat, \u201cit\u2019s hijacking the biological tendency to want peer feedback,\u201d Prinstein said. Tweens do a lot of mutual emotional disclosure in the normal course of growing up, he went on, \u201cbut if they\u2019re going to a chatbot, they miss out on practicing skills that we use for the rest of our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
The third complaint against the use of A.I. in schools is that it confuses ends and means, privileging the most efficient route to the correct answer, the crispest thesis statement, or the neatest drawing over the messier and less quantifiable process of building a thinking, feeling person. \u201cWe are potentially undermining complex thinking, changing the development of sociality, and mistaking the learning goal,\u201d Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who is a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at University of Southern California, told me. \u201cWe are cutting off learning at the knees.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even some pro-A.I. education advocates concede that A.I. poses significant cognitive and social-emotional risks to young people. Amanda Bickerstaff is the co-founder and C.E.O. of the organization AI for Education, which provides training for educators and students on generative A.I. literacy. \u201cChildren should not be using chatbots under age ten,\u201d Bickerstaff told me. \u201cThese tools require expertise and evaluation skills that even many adults don\u2019t have.\u201d Google\u2019s decision to make Gemini available to all ages, she said, marked one of the few times in her career that she has lost sleep over a work-related matter; she recalled thinking, \u201cThey so clearly know that this is going to be bad for kids, and yet they\u2019re still going to do it.\u201d Bickerstaff went on, \u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019re asking really basic questions like, \u2018If a kid can immediately make a picture instead of draw one, what will happen to that kid\u2019s ability to think on their own and draw?\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The message from the White House\u2014and, often, from tech companies and public schools\u2014is that Figure 03 and its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":406785,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,45533,344,243,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-406784","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence-a-i","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-education","13":"tag-il","14":"tag-israel","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}