Opening That Door

 New York and Los Angeles, two of they country's largest school districts, have issued temporary bans on Artificial Intelligence. The most obvious reason being that in a place where plants are grown, bringing in plastic flowers doesn't make a lot of sense. 

I am, for the time being, the Media Arts teacher at an elementary school up the road apiece from Los Angeles. Coincidentally, if one were to travel that road you would have to drive through a region once known as Silicon Valley. I would like to change the name, since that sort of thing seems all the rage right now, to Uncanny Valley. 

First, a little background: My career as a Media Arts teacher began in a previous century when I was simply the computer teacher. The "lab" in which I worked was filled with Mac LCIIs, nominally networked by wires to tractor feed printers. Aside from the opportunity to play what the kids referred to as "The Shooting Game" which was the floppy disc driven eight bit version of Oregon Trail, the other main concession of those times was the chance to make a picture using Kid Pix. In spite of my exhortations to try and use the freehand tool of drawing lines and shapes with their mouse, my little artists were more than content to plotz a page-filling stamp of a heart with their tame vaguely typed on or near it and insist that I print it out. For their mom. 

Eventually through very kind donations from our business partner, our school was able to install a PC lab that would connect to Al Gore's Internet. For some time this setup required a good deal of help running programs from CDs that needed loading and setup from yours truly. It wasn't until I started running web-based programs like Starfall that I was able to shift away from typing tutors and simple math games. Not long after that, Google Docs and Sheets allowed us to write stories and slideshows that were all part of the eternal student plea: Can I be done now?

As students started to enter my room with more and more native user skills, it did not take long before they discovered the copy and paste tool that allowed many of the most clever to lift chunks of text or images to suit their needs. Access to Wikipedia made it possible for those in the know to lift a three paragraph essay on The Oregon Trail in minutes, leaving plenty of time for playing Cool Math Games. 

I would like to believe that I was that most savvy educator who was able to detect this intellectual theft and force these kids back on the path of "meaningful research" and a journey of self-discovery. I know that this was not always the case. 

Now, coincidental with the budget-driven gutting of our district's tech department, the doors to the kingdom of Artificial Intelligence have been left in the hands of "teacher discretion." Currently this particular teacher of children ages five to eleven has chosen to keep that issue off the table, even as online companies have begun to encourage all users to embrace these tools. I'm looking at you, Google. Since the Uncanny Valley stalwart is the same company that supplies our district with Chromebooks for student use, that Pandora's box is opened right along with the lid to every laptop. 

"Hey Google, write me a three paragraph essay on the evils of Artificial Intelligence." 

Did I mention that our school district, along with the state of California, no longer allows student use of cell phones at school? But we seem to be fine with the "discretionary use" of artificial intelligence. 

Did I mention that I am planning to retire at the end of this school year?