For Christian Thomas, a senior at Heights High School in Texas, artificial intelligence policies once hampered learning attempts.
Thomas is participating in the school's International Baccalaureate Program, which uses AI detectors to check for plagiarism. “We use AI to check for other types of AI,” says Thomas.
However, in schools, AI also sifts through information.
When trying to study what the education system looked like in communist Cuba during the Cold War of the History Project, Thomas realized he had no access to the materials. Her school web filter continued to block her with both her school computer and her personal laptop when she was on campus.
Schools often use AI for web filtering to prevent students from accessing dangerous materials, but some students are also worried about preventing them from discovering useful information. The technology also appears to understand key tools, students say: With chat features that connect students to certified counselors, the Trevor project, which offers a teenage hotline for suicide facilities, could get caught up in Chatbot Bans. JSTOR, a database containing millions of academic articles, could be banned because it contains sexually explicit articles. And internet archives, which are often used as a free way for students to access information, are also prohibited.
For Thomas, this AI development meant her Could not She investigates persuasive topics. She had to change her focus for the task, she says.
Educators' concerns about AI have attracted a lot of attention. What is less understood is the fact that many students have concerns about the way artificial intelligence is shaping learning now.
In providing guidance on school topics, state policies have so far ignored the most obvious civil rights concerns raised by the technology. In an age where students fear the federal government that closes immigration, targeting students' political opinions and allowing the book to be banned, some worry about the role of enhanced vibrancy using AI tools.
This has to do with students — along with related worries about fraud and deepfake accusations — but they are not completely denial of technology, several teens told Edsurge. However, in the discussions that often unfold around them, students feel that they should amplify their voices.
Eyes that have not been blown away
Schools sometimes rely on AI to scan students' online activities and assess risks to flag educators and other adults when they need to intervene. Several studies suggest that surveillance is “forced.”
It is also difficult to analyze how all the information collected is used. For example, Columbia University's Night First Amendment Institute filed a lawsuit earlier this year against Grapevine Collieville Independent School District in Texas. After the lawsuit arises after the district refused to disclose information from its request for public information, the Knight Institute filed about how the district uses information it has collected from student surveillance on school-issued devices.
However, a 13-year-old Tennessee student has been arrested. Tennessee was stripped searched after arrest claiming that the scan came after being misinterpreted in a private chat linked to a school email account. According to legal documents, schools use surveillance services Gaggle to scan student messages and content to detect threats. Report analysis claims that these systems are prone to false positives and flag many harmless comments and images, and Kansas student journalists have filed a lawsuit alleging that their use is a violation of their constitutional rights.
Students began to oppose all of this. For example, Thomas works with students working in Texas advances. Texas, says Thomas, is a nonprofit that trains how to speak in schools and trains them to mobilize around topics they care about, such as book bans and how schools interact with immigration enforcement.
She helps other students organize issues such as web filtering at the center. This practice is sometimes troubling, she says, as it is unclear whether humans are reviewing these processes. When Thomas asked a district near the school with stricter rules about the list of prohibited websites, IT staff told her it was “physically impossible.” In some respects, she says, that makes sense, because the list will be “ultra double length.” But it also leaves her with a way to make sure there are real people who will oversee these decisions.
There is also a lobbying component.
Students working in Texas advances will lobby at 1773 Texas House Building and will establish a position as student councillor who has not voted for the state's school board. The group successfully challenged the Texas rules that sought to protect students from “indecent content” contained in the bill that the group restricted speeches by restricting access to social media platforms. Recently, the group has also made progress on the state's Bill of Rights for Students', seeking freedom of expression, health, happiness and support for student institutions.
Thomas says she did not personally lobby the school board bill, but she supported the lawsuit and the Student Bill of Rights.
Other organizations are also looking at students to lead change.
Fake images, real trauma
Until graduating from high school last year, Deeksha Vaidyanathan was the leader of the California Chapter of Encode, a student-led advocacy organization.
In the beginning of his sophomore year, Vaidyanathan advocated a championship in California's speeches and discussions on the ban on biometric technology. Her research into police use of technology has created part of Encode's work as an organization focused on AI ethics. “So that kind of thing sparked my interest,” she says.
She had already been introduced to be encoded by friends, but after the competition she joined and spent the rest of her high school career working with the organization.
Founded in 2020 by Sneha Revanur – once called “Greta Thunberg of AI”, the encoding supports the activism of grassroots youth across the nation and indeed around the world with AI. In her role in leading the organization's California chapter, and in an independent project inspired by her time in encoding, Vaidyanathan has worked on a research project that attempts to identify how police use prediction systems, such as facial recognition, to track criminals. She also strives to pass local school district policies on using AI ethically in the classroom and limiting harm caused by deepfakes.
For her, her work was also close to her home.
Vaidyanathan noticed that the school at Dublin High School in East Bay, California, has a different policy on AI use. Some teachers allowed students to use it, others banned it and relied on surveillance tools such as bark, gaggle, and goguardian to catch and punish students who were cheating. Vaidyanathan felt that a better approach was to consistently adjust how technology is used to be ethically done in the task. She worked with the district's chief technology officer and together she investigated students and teachers and put together a policy over a six-month period. It finally passed. According to Vaidyanathan, no other schools within a 100-mile radius have passed such a policy before. But it provided these regulatory frameworks and inspiring attempts to place similar policies in Indiana, Philadelphia and Texas, she adds.
So, university students currently attending UC Berkeley, Vaidyanathan, are hoping to continue working with the organization.
“Most areas of AI control in the classroom are probably ignored,” Vaidyanathan said.
But the biggest of these is deepfake. Young girls from schools across the country are targeted by fake, sexually explicit portraits of themselves created using AI. The so-called “Nudify” app can take one photo, spin out persuasive fakes, leading to trauma.
Student research shows that it is a common practice.
Additionally, in a review of school leadership countries released earlier this year, the Center for Democracy and Technology identified as a prominent weak area that it has not received significant counsel from the state for how schools handle these thorny issues.
Furthermore, even the guidelines Vaidyanathan considers effective are not formal policies, such as California or Oregon, and therefore need not be enacted in the classroom. When encoding tries to work with the school, they often get overwhelmed by the information and seem uncertain about what to do. However, in student testimony collected by the group and shared with Edsurge, students struggle with the problem.
AI should empower people rather than control them, says Sutir Paruchuri, a rising high school senior and leader of the Texas Encoding Chapter.
It is important to restrict who has access to student data and incorporate the voices of affected people into the decision-making process. Now, he says his ENCODE chapter is particularly addressing sexual deepfake policies without consent, particularly local legislative advocacy. The group tried to encourage the Texas legislature to consider student perspectives, he added.
The goal is “AI safety,” says Palchuri. For him, it means ensuring that AI is used in ways that protect people's rights, respect their dignity, avoid unintended harm, and avoid particularly vulnerable groups.
