Mayor Zohran Mamdani and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels are unveiling new guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom.
How can one man possibly be so based?
I may be a straight white man, but I have such a political boner for Mamdani.
He’s like…what would happen if a politician didn’t go out of their way to make everybodies life worse?
I’ve literally never seen a Mamdani headline that didn’t give me the warm and fuzzies in my tum-tum.
The ironic thing is, I’ve never been willing to go to war for any country. If Mamdani needed an army, I’d be there. But the irony is that he would never want an army. He just wants everyone to be happy.
How do you feel about the city run grocery stores he’s trying to start up? Everyone else left because theft was insane, then takes plummeted when they put everything behind security cabinets (or whatever they’re called).
Hadn’t heard of this. I’ll have to look into it, but in general it sounds like he tried to do a good thing. Then people ruined it.
BANNING the thing his Constituents HATE? This is TERRIBLE for the Country!
-Democrats!
It’s wild that doing obviously correct things is such big news.
Wtf does a kid need to learn about AI?
It’s a fucking chatbot. Even as someone that uses it regularly for work there was very little to learn about it. If you learn how to type from your days as an iPad kid, or how to talk from listening to your parents berate each other, you already know everything necessary to use AI to cheat your way out of ever having to learn anything.
You’re already in school. Why not try learning a thing or two first to see if you hate it enough to never do it again?
Both turning point USA, and Prager U have educational programs they really really want forced into the k12 system.
Worth noting that these Ai programs focus heavily on charlie kirk making you write paragraphs on why hes a hero. Or with Prager U they have classes that claim slavery wasn’t a thing, we just gave black people jobs and houses like Milton s Hershey. It was actually the south who where the good guys and technically won the civil war.
Ai is revisionist history. Grok tells you there is no genocide in Gaza but will insist that the white genocide on south American farmers is a real thing. People are making thousands of YouTube slop channels on history that get facts consistently wrong, and that data is getting picked back up my gemeni ai. People are slowly losing access to real information, and its being replaced with whatever the epstine class decides is “real history” or the info that uses to be free and real, is now being replaced by desperate individuals who think history is “content” and nothing else.
A lot of jobs are heavily encouraging AI usage (some even straight of forcing it).
Knowing how to use it in a work environment in a way that won’t fuck everything up is a useful skill. Biggest part of that is not blindly trusting what the AI says and/or copy pasting the result without double checking it first. But also using optimal prompts, knowledge sources, etc.
There’s also other forms of AI other than LLMs that are used in research and the medical field. How those would be used in HS idk but they are pretty cool to learn about if your a science nerd like myself.
Dude, I use LLMs daily as a developer. There’s practically nothing about using them that can’t be taught in like an hour once you’re an adult. You definitely don’t need to develop a dependency on them in grade school.
You should meet my coworkers. They are terrible at using it and most of them spend 5k/mo on it. We have access to 4 different AI tools, and they all insist on using the worst (Devin’s web UI, think ChatGPT but it does coding). They don’t even compile their code before posting PRs. The web UI Devin can’t compile it cause it runs on Linux and the ancient legacy app we are on is windows only (COM+).
I strongly dislike AI, but have to use it. if I am forced to use it, I will use it efficiently and effectively.
I’m setting up learning sessions on how to use terminal based AI like Claude code, OMP, etc. cause they are so obnoxious with such a terrible tool.
I hate having to teach these training sessions and don’t want to get labeled as the “ai guy” but like if you are going to destroy the world, you might as well produce something a little bit better than pure slop. Have some self respect and some standards.
Sorry for the rant. It’s been bothering me and I wanted to get it out there.
No worries. Yeah, I have been a reluctant adopter of the technology. I honestly didn’t really buy much of the hype until Claude code and some of the better models came along.
Even frontier models screw up on their first, second, and even third tries at times. The insight that Anthropic really had was realizing that they needed to be allowed to chat with themselves in a loop, fail in a loop, and that they’re much better if you apply objective standards to the projects (things like unit tests of course, but also integration tests, static code analysis, etc).
The harness is really the thing. Even OpenCode in my experience can produce things that are fairly decent.
That’s where I think both initial implementations of code helpers (i.e., a vanilla “chat box” with “tools”, and “agentic workflows” that try to one-shot everything) that were made in the initial round of “doing AI” are effectively useless garbage that should be buried like radioactive waste.
If you don’t prod it, Claude will also spit out worthless crap that doesn’t work at all too. The key is to add all of the plumbing that reasonable projects have (code formatters, linters, etc. etc. forever) and to add gating so that Claude can cycle away getting it wrong and then correcting itself until it gets it right.
EDIT: More relatedly to this thread, I don’t think I would have any problem with some type of high school elective course where kids could use claude code or something like it to try to write some software. It’s pretty likely that there are some kids already doing so in their free time. I came of age in a similar era for technology in general, and I took three or four electives where I was doing things with computers and it was helpful. About the only argument against it I can think of is a practical one…I don’t think school IT departments are ready for the havoc the kids could potentially unleash with this stuff, and it could be that they do not have the staff necessary to support its usage.
Because as it turns out, it’s far from just a chatbot these days. Coding agents are but an example.
Kids need to learn about it because companies are using it more and more, and they prioritize hiring those who know how to use it. This will only increase as AI is proving itself to be more and more capable.
In this context, that means understanding how it works beyond the initial “chatbot”. That means knowing what agents are, what turns are, what tool calls are, what memory is and why the quality of the harness matters so much.
But it also includes knowing about it’s dangers, such as hallucinations and sycophancy and how to mitigate them (give it a way to prove its result for hallucinations and neutral questions for sycophancy).
Though I agree before high school kids probably don’t have the ability to judge its output yet. Hell most adults don’t.
Dude, use it daily. Grade schoolers do not need “expertise”. Also why are you in fuck AI rimming AI so hard?
Rimming AI? It’s reality my dude. None of what I said was false.
I swear people around here pretend to be so different, then their first solution to the AI dilemma is censorship rather than education.
“I don’t want people to know about X because I don’t like X, so we should ban X” what is this a right wing forum?
It’s not about “knowing about AI”. I’m sure many kids can and do use it already to cheat. It’s about what you’re teaching kids when they’re in school. What place does it have in grade school learning? I’d argue zero. Apparently, Mamdani agrees.
Unless you’re campaigning to teach grade schoolers how to train their own language models I don’t see what value teaching kids to use products actually has. It’s fucking dead simple to use. You don’t even have to be able to read.
You should be able to think critically before using it. And using it doesn’t help you think critically at all, it tries to constantly tell you that you’re the most special little user in the whole world.
Again, I use it daily. Its use is unnecessary in a grade school classroom. Not everything on earth needs to be part of a grade school curriculum.
In grade school I agree, in high school though…. But even in grade school. These kids are already using it at home, wouldn’t it be good to teach them to use it properly rather than drinking everything it says as as fact?
I’m not sure why you don’t see the value though. If the market rewards such experience, why should it not be taught? Is that not the purpose of school? To prepare kids to work? Though honestly there should probably be mandatory personal finance courses before there are AI ones. That’s one area most people severely lack.
As for it being “dead simple to use” I guess that means you have no idea how AI works. Even people making them, the best in the field, still aren’t using LLMs to the best of their capacity. This is part of the current ongoing research. Of course if all you ask it for is how long to cook your pizza for, then yeah I guess it’s dead simple.
I’m not sure why you don’t see the value though.
I’m not sure why me “seeing the value” or “not seeing the value” has anything to do with this.
If the market rewards such experience, why should it not be taught?
Oh ok so now kids need to be taught a curriculum based upon what the stock market says. Sure buddy.
Is that not the purpose of school? To prepare kids to work?
That’s actually not the purpose of school, but I’m sure that’s what you think the purpose of school is, and I’m not going to be able to persuade you in this or any other thread that you’re wrong.
Just go back to hacker news or reddit already with the other “free market” scumbags and leave me alone.
As for it being “dead simple to use” I guess that means you have no idea how AI works.
Oh I’m sorry I’m not linked up to AI with a neural netted chip in my brain. I use them by typing words into a chatbot window unlike you, Royal AI wizard. I’m so glad you took the time out of your day to communicate with me, a mere peasant.
Even people making them, the best in the field, still aren’t using LLMs to the best of their capacity.
Lol dude these things have already sucked up enough dollars and rivers that they don’t need your tongue bath too.
Unfortunate that it ends this way, but still, thanks for taking the time to argue with me.
I wish New York City much joy in their sunshine and rainbows socialism timeline
His state’s Board of Education would like a word? This is like the Mayor’s promises to change the filthy, crime-ridden buses and trains. He doesn’t have control over all the money that fuels the schools. He doesn’t have much legal authority, either, for sweeping policy change. He’s just doing the Spongebob rainbow over his head thing.
