Since this is back-to-school time, you can bet that somewhere right now a professor is printing out an AI policy on the first page of a syllabus, underlining “prohibited” and trusting detection software to enforce the ban. But the software doesn’t work, at least not reliably. It never has.

Here’s what they are missing. You can’t keep AI out of a classroom, and the harder you try, the more you’ve stopped teaching and started policing. Students have already decided whether the machine should be part of how they think. The only question left to a professor is what to do about it.

In my opinion, the premise is backwards. A classroom is supposed to prepare students for the world they’re about to enter.

Happy Friday in NYC, where public schools are once again proving their commitment to old-fashioned learning.

Almost exactly a year after implementing a city-wide bell-to-bell ban on cellphones, the Education Department is now rolling out a total moratorium on use of student-facing AI tools in the classroom for students from 2-K through eighth grade. That includes chatbots, AI tutors and AI-power educational apps, and all use of generative AI. The initiative also recommends reducing overall screen time for middle schoolers from 30 to 45 minutes and limiting AI access for high schoolers.

“Younger students need hands-on learning, social interaction, play, and teacher-guided instruction,” Education Department officials wrote in a policy document obtained by Chalkbeat. “Routine individual screen use can crowd out those experiences.”

All over the country, municipal governments are scrambling to regulate the rapid proliferation of AI tools in the classroom. New York’s new policy represents one of the more aggressive stances taken by a major school district so far. The new rules have received a range of reactions, with some advocates worried they could leave students at a disadvantage, while others argue the ban doesn’t go far enough. 

School bans have a funny way of breeding students who are extremely talented at circumventing them. We may just have a generation of genius AI smugglers on our hands.

Feminist activist Gloria Steinem has died aged 92.

Known almost as much for her trademark mid-parted hair and large aviator sunglasses as for her acute intelligence, courage and wit, she will long be known for setting feminist torches alight globally over her six-decade career as a journalist, activist and feminist icon.

Steinem has always been candid about the impact her early life had on the decisions she later made.

Ten years after she was born in Toledo, Ohio (March 25 1934), her parents divorced. Following the departure of her travelling salesman father, young Gloria was left taking care of her mentally ill mother until she graduated from high school and her sister took over.

Years later she reflected that she “became a grown-up too early, from ten to 17, a small person responsible for a big person”.

Read on to learn more about the feminist icon and revolutionary thinker.

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