Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations
no paywall https://archive.md/1lSRA
https://fortune.com/2025/08/07/schools-ai-surveillance-students-children-arrested-jokes/Open linkView original on feddit.nl943
Comments227
There is something fundamentally fucked up in a country that arrests and puts in jail a 13 years old kid over a bad joke.
And strip-searched!
Without notifying parents
Oh I missed that bit. JFC she's 13. How can police be so clueless about their own job... rhetorical question, I know the answer.
"clueless" thats pretty much what the leo jobs are.
You don't understand, they are brown \s
But can't put the pedo convicted felon grifter behind bars...
The result of "no tolerance policies".
Are schools not government organisations (in most cases) and would they not be subject to the first amendment?
The first amendment is not absolute - things like threats are not protected speech. Although I agree that in this instance there might be a case that her constitutional rights were violated, I suspect it would be dismissed as having been a justifiable action from the administration/police who "couldn't ignore a credible threat" or something equally bullshit...
Not sure what's worse here: how the police overreacted or that the software immediately contacts law enforcement, without letting teachers (n.b.: they are the experts here, not the police) go through the positives first.
But oh, that would mean having to pay somebody, at least some extra hours, in addition to the no doubt expensive software. JFC.
Man, if only there was a good way to stop school shooting
Alas, one can only dream
"no way to stop this" says the only country where this happens
I didn’t realize the schools were using Run, Hide, Fight. That is the same policy for hospital staff in the event of an active shooter. Maddening.
Having worked in quite a few fields in the last 15 years or so, it's the same active shooter training they give everyone. Even in stores that sell guns.
I'll let the reader decide how fucked up it is that there's basically a countrywide accepted "standard response"
Thank you for widening this perspective. I had no idea, but it fits.
I'm sorry, in hospitals? Where a significant portion of the patients can do none of those things?
They’re not residents, you’re thinking of nursing homes. Roughly a third of hospital patients can walk without assistance, but yes. The rationale is staff doesn’t turn themselves into bullet sponges, because then who is left to remove the bullets once the shooter is dead? Either way, what do unarmed, untrained (to fight) people with the body armor equivalent of pajamas do to stop bullets?
The patient room doors don’t lock. Sometimes those doors are made of glass. But herding the patients who can walk into the halls is likely an opportunity for an active shooter to hit more targets. As such, everyone hunkers down, and the police take care of it. In theory, per the training modules. Police sometimes run drills with the hospital, depending on locale and interagency dealings.
Shutting all the fire doors is likely the only defense. Those nurses can be crafty on the fly, but there are limitations.
I can’t imagine a secondary piece of this policy isn’t hospitals avoiding liability regarding workplace injury/death lawsuits.
I just hadn’t known until now that in grasping for solutions schools found the standardized hospital policy and are running with it.
I guess that the hospital is one of the better places to get shot.
Hospital staff.
I missed that part lol, mb
Why maddening? The active shooter response shouldn't be all that different.
You should try Europe once. It's more fun than your 3rd world country.
Knowing that Europe literally has a problem with its soccer audiences making monkey noises at black athletes makes this particular bit of condescension all the more ridiculous.
Idiots and assholes exist everywhere. At least ours don't have guns.
Yeah, they use knives instead.
The knife homicide rate is literally higher in the US.
If you think I'm trying to say the US is better.. by any measure LOL! -No. The US is a shithole.
My point is that if you take guns out of the equation they'll just be replaced by something else.
This isn’t the flex you think it is.
Wasn't intended to be. But evil people will find a way to do evil.
A lot of Europe seems to somehow have worse racism in some areas than the US. Ask a couple English people what they think of travellers and Muslims.
The Asiaphobia that still goes on in the UK is absurd...
I'll still never get over the British Dub of Takeshi's Castle referring to contestants as "Happy Clappy Jappy Chappies" and "Kamikaze Cousins"
A shame, I really wanted to watch that version, it has Craig Charles doing the narrating, but.. sorry Lister, seems you can't help but be a smeghead around the Japanese.
Is this better, worse, or the same as throwing dildos at female WNBA athletes?
Reddit moment: comparing a few racist idiots with daily murders.
I think if the matches are having to be stopped, it's probably more than a few.
"Daily murder" is a sneaky rhetorical maneuver, considering it's something influenced more by raw population size, than by capita. It's easy for there to be a "daily murder" in a country of 340,000,000 people, even when the overwhelmingly vast majority of people do not murder.
Using "few" to trivialize/minimize the racism is no better.
Shame on you for this disingenuousness.
Even when we go per capita the US stays a shithole, it's not like they were trying to actively misinform people.
That’s because US population has too much freedom. Gotta keep a boot on peoples neck to maintain control. Look at the 466+ people arrested for protesting
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-police-arrest-more-than-466-protest-banned-palestine-action-group-2025-08-09/
Agreed on the condescension, that was uncalled for. Your whataboutism sucks though.
What do you mean, “try Europe?”
The police are not effective at dealing with school shootings.
Authorities be like "aww shoot, not again."
Yeah, at the very least, the software should be passing on the statement, and context surrounding it, along with its 'judgment', to the authorities, putting all the responsibility for making the call that X genuinely merits action on said authorities.
Of course, that's just one piece of the puzzle, and not a solution if law enforcement isn't held accountable when they fuck up.
I hate how fully leapfrogged the conversation about surveillance was. It's so disgusting that it's just assumed that all of your communications should be read by your teachers, parents, and school administration just because you're a minor. Kids deserve privacy too.
The cruelty is the point.
Holy shit, the amount of surveillance the teens are under is ungodly and people blame the chatbot? And there wasn't even a human kind enough to speak with the girl before calling the fucking cops? I see a lot of blame to place here, but it's not the chatbot who is to blame.
Everyone of them failed a 13 year old girl. All of them should be ashamed.
This is America, that's what they do. They love overreacting to small problems.
I was arrested for self-defence in a highschool fight, the actual bully who attack me did not get in any sort of trouble. If I didn't have citizenship, there was a chance that incident could've led to my deportation, even tho I was a minor. (USCIS can see all your arrests, including those that did not led to a conviction, or even expunged or pardoned offences, and they could retroactively revoke your legal status if they find out you lied.) But luckily charges were dropped because of couse they don't have the evidence to prove it and I have a clean record so they didn't bother prosecuting.
There is probably an alternate timeline somewhere out there in the multiverse where I got deported and had to learn another language that I haven't spoken for over a decade. Depressing to think about.
(Well that is still technically a possibility, all they have to do is make up some bullshit about "being a spy" and put me in gitmo)
I'm in Canada and it's only marginally better with respect to police under/overreaction. A friend and I once got the "don't go to school on X day" message and we went immediately to local, provincial, and federal police. No one took us seriously. We had a friend working at CSIS (American analogue would be CIA) look into it and later that week we saw the article in a local paper.
Police investigated the home and found:
Point being we couldn't get the police to lift a finger to check out what we believed to be a credible threat (this guy never even joked about that stuff), but boy were they willing to burn rubber racing to my school when I committed the crime of defending myself in a "normal" school fight and one of my bullies claimed they felt threatened by me. This event set off a whole series of events, like requiring me to get a full evaluation at a psychiatric facility, before being allowed back in school. Our system is broken.
It's what they do instead of reacting to major problems in any way.
One of my possible theories is that the alternate timelines diverge for each of us at moments we could have died. The timeline diverges and one continues on with us and one without us; sometimes while "dying" timelines merge back together resulting in stories like reddit's r/glitchinthematrix
So if it's any consolation, your bully probably died in your deportation timeline.
At any moment a tiny bit of clotted blood cells could suddenly lodge somewhere inconvenient and kill you so this timeline shit would be happening every second 24/7. Kind of renders these timeline thought experiments pointless.
That would just be a possibility until it actually happens, until the actual crisis point.
For example, we're not diverging with every step on a flight of stairs. However, have you ever experienced that moment of vertigo where you thought you missed a step and then felt your foot land solid on the next? That would be the moment.
I don't think that's how quantum immortality works.
I don't think I called my theory 'quantum immortality' 🤔😉
Ya, AI is not the story here.
To me it didn't sound like she was being bullied, it seemed like her friends made a stupid joke and then she responded with another stupid joke. Which makes it even stupider that she got arrested. Literally just kids being kids.
The US will do anything and everything except try proper gun control
Proper gun control? Nah let's spy on kids
It's for the children!!
/s
This is exactly what is going to happen with the fucking chat control of the EU actually enforces it, but for an entire continent. Fuck this shit. Privacy is a human right.
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
I am Canadian, how can I help? Because this shit is coming to Canada, too.
The only hope is to immigrate to a place without this shit.
When the rain starts coming through this tree, we'll just move to another one.
Ez bro just get on a plane
that defeatist attitude is helping no one and is not how a resilient democracy survives
We're way past a resilient democracy buddy.
with this attitude certainly, buddy
but seriously, yes it's scary what is happening around the world right now but that means we as citizens need to organize and resist. This is how every social and moral good that we enjoy today was won. Freedom from oppression is a constant fight and always has been
It's your choice, but I'm leaving.
Immigrating costs billions of dollars
The countries where this is not happening is narrowing so seriously that there is no where left to run.
The few ones are already good enough.
Go fuck yourself (As in the school)
Why are you being so aggressive?
Why are you being so passive?
There's not much else the little guy can do. 😔
Arrested and strip-searched for a first offense? That's fucking ridiculous. I hope the lawsuit succeeds. It's the only peaceful tool we have to curb over-zealous law enforcement.
This is an ass-covering response to school shootings, because some of the shooters have expressed their intent before.
A strip search obviously isn't necessary even if it's a credible threat; a metal detector wand and basic pat down is more than enough to ensure someone doesn't have a gun. This wasn't a credible threat though, and a chat with the school counselor would have been the right way to handle this.
Yeah, that was my first thought too. I can see the need to take anything that resembles an actionable threat seriously, but that poor kid did not deserve to be abused by law enforcement like that.
This is the problem
Yea, if nothing else hopefully this will make at least a few kids think about online privacy.
Lots of wannabe authoritarians out there in educationland.
All those decades that the schools just -couldn't afford- more (well-educated) teachers and smaller class sizes. Lots of low-end look-good.
And then along came tech, and lo-and-behold, IT was going to be the savior. Let's buy into that! We may not be able to teach them to read, write or think, but they can learn to kneel!
I couldn't agree more.
It's fucking pathetic.
Citizen! Good news! Your writings have been randomly selected by Friend Computer for review!
A select team of Troubleshooters has been dispatched to bathe your general area in soothing Raytheon ^(tm)^ Brain Beams until your attitude improves.
OK FC, come at me! But be warned, I've been armed by Hancock! AND Pink Floyd!
My sense of humor is dry, dark, and absurdist. I’d go to jail every week for the sorts of things I joke about if I was a kid today. This is complete lunacy.
Example of an average joke on my part: speed up and run over that old lady crossing the street!
It makes my partner laugh. I laugh. We both know I don’t mean it. But a crappy AI tool wouldn’t understand that.
Something tells me that our type of jokes are on the way out bro. As you said, there's no room for nuance in this story, so I'm afraid we'll eventually all be listened in on 100% of the time until someone says something 'actionable'. If you're not already on a multitude of lists by now, you're doing something wrong.
Nah, dark humor is like a child with cancer, it never gets old.
My understanding is those types of jokes are now en vogue, at least with Republicans. Wait, maybe it’s only wrong when they’re jokes, but it’s OK when the Republicans are serious about these things.
Depends on the complexion of the old lady crossing the street.
Yeah especially around middle school, the "darker" the "joke" the more funny it was
Just don't allow an ai on the jury. If you are on a jury tell tpe judge you want the prosecuting lawyers disbarred for wasting your time.
You know what really grinds my gears? This shitty dystopia completely eschews any potentially cool aspect of invasive exploitative authoritarianism. The (not so) secret police is patching together their own "uniforms" by browsing the bargain bins at the local tacti-cool mall-ninja outfitters. Where's the black leather trench coats, stylish sunglasses worn after dark and slicked back hair? If they're going to ask me for 'ze papers' all the time, the least they can do is look cool doing it, godamnit. At least get Hugo Boss to design your attire; that's just about the only thing that worked out well for the last bunch of pricks.
I mean, where's the towering brutalist architecture? Where's my mandatory daily dose of SOMA? Or my idiotically wirelessly hackable cyberware? Hell, they can't even do bread and circuses right anymore. The bread is CO2-pumped flour glue and the circuses is an endless stream of more Marvel projects and Disney violations of Star Wars.
And don't get me started on the quality of our dictators these days. They sure don't make them like they used to.
Can’t they at least smoke cigarettes in a cool and threatening manner?!
I think that's illegal now too. Can't have anything interfering with the glorious vision of a relentlessly productive citizenry that ideally slave away for the benefits of their owners until they die in the office chair at age 74 - right before qualifying for pension.
Well, except for the health "care" system. That's an exception, but only because the only thing better than ruthless exploitation is diversified ruthless exploitation. Gotta keep the peons on their toes, lest they get uppity.
Hey, some of the newer Star Wars stuff is alright! Sometimes!
Mom, can we have Equilibrium at home?
"ICE reached out to both Mr. Bale and Mr. Bean in an attempt to address the current gun-fu deficit of the agency, but regrettably neither had any interest in the job."
I think China is doing a good job at that.
The whole trend of teens rejecting phones for dumbphones is making sense now. If you can't fight big mainstream technology, then fuck big mainstream technology!
As soon as my pixel 8 shits the bed I'm going back to a dumbphone
I'm gonna snag another used Oneplus phone that has decent community love and keep rolling custom roms until Google stops me.
...and once they stop me(in ten years or so), a dumphone with tethering and a secondary device. And if they implant a chip into my brain, I'll go luddite, live in the woods, read poetry and eat mushrooms.
Hey, this is me! Currently using a OnePlus 5 with LineageOS and a Sunbeam phone. If I need to connect to the Internet or use any phone app, I just use my hotspot.
and then it's even worse, you go through sms which is even less confidential
...In a way yes, in a way no. A phone that's SMS and Calls only has a few advantages. One is that other apps can't spy on SMS because there aren't other apps to spy on the SMS. The SMS vulnerabilities en-route still exist, sure, but you're no longer being monitored by Apple, Google or anyone else by default.
Sure, the ideal situation is for all of them to get on Signal, XMPP, Briar, SimpleX... fucking roll a D20. They're also more about it due to screen-on time than privacy. I don't think they're of any belief that privacy is even attainable.
Encrypted messengers for the win
I hope a future where Google is kicked out of Android but that won’t happen
Another school shooting avoided! Just kidding, we just tortured a child for fun.
Which kinda seems like a villain origin story to me.
What is sad is that an environment like this ruins someone’s mental health and ironically increasing the overall risk of violence.
Don't remember whose quote it was, maybe Hannah Arendt, that the real tragedy of tyranny is not when people self-censor what they say out loud, but when this leads them to filter out those thoughts from arising at all
That's the surveillance panopticon, they know they are being watched, but not when.
Then, those in charge can criminalise you.
We are living in the shittiest kind of cyberpunk dystopia. Can't wait for AI-induced cyber-psychosis once people implant Musk's chips into their brains and give MechaHitler full access to their subconscious.
The good news is newer chips go on the OUTSIDE of your head because it turns out, you can't market brain surgery
I can't say for certain because I wasn't given one but I can't imagine me and my friends would have been willing to communicate with each other on devices provided by our school. Even in the early 00s it would have been filled with spyware.
I cannot possibly imagine trusting a school issued device.
Yeah for sure. My friends and I were completely paranoid about stuff like that.
Talking about online privacy has become the “safe sex talk” of the last decade or so. You have to keep reminding kids so that it sticks. Nothing you say online is private, it can all be copied/screengrabbed/recorded/photographed and shared by the recipient. What you say, any images you post, etc. On school or work devices they can essentially see most everything, nothing is private. Even if you make efforts to cover your tracks, a truly determined agency with enough resources likely will find out who you are if they want to.
Even if you fully trust the recipient, often times it can still be intercepted unless it's end-to-end encrypted, but even then the end device can still be stolen too.
It not just schools. Its everywhere. I was on reddit just last week, talking about when I was 15 and fancying one of my teachers. I got banned for "soliciting sex from a minor"... And whats worse, when I appealed, they upheld it. Some human actually read a comment in which I spoke about when I was 15. And took that to mean I was asking kids if they want to see some puppies or something. The insane online world of the far left and right has fucked us all.
With you up until bringing the far left into this. What does universal healthcare, trans rights or taxing billionaires have to do with the surveillance state, aside from dismantling it?
I would argue that universal healthcare, trans rights and taxing billionaires are not far left, but Im not American.
But they ARE leftist topics
Maybe when we say far left or right we really mean authoritarian? Either way democracy seems to be on the back foot rn.
Yes but that doesn't mean it's a far left topic. This is the problem in politics nobody has the ability to understand that even an individual political system is an entire political Spectrum onto its own. Be it right or left.
Sadly people get Tankies, Neo-Liberals and the Real Left mixed up
Example of far left: https://packaged-media.redd.it/eyg6tdj6i0if1/pb/m2-res_480p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1754827200&s=41dbeacb928ab6a2cc8b90071d6700706efae7a4
Far left is guillotines, this is just someone with issues (I don't mean her opinion but the fact that she has to try and "calm herself")
No, thats a performative cunt. Its funny how you can recognise them so easily when they thing you dont like, but are so utterly confused when they say things you agree with. Almost like you have your own little agenda or something?
I mean, on the subject of trans people. It never seems to enter anyones heads that they amount of hate transwomen get is because people see them as men. And its actually an extension of the extreme misandry the online world has embraced. Thats why we never talk about trans men, because they are still seen as women. But the far left, or woke, or whatever other name you wanna give them, wont ever admit that. Because they want to call "all men" scum who need to be taught not to rape, while at the same time shouting that transwomen are safe because they are women. They dont dare tackle the elephant in the room, which is that that they agree with what the far right is saying, under certain circumstances.
Anyone, and I mean anyone, that speaks of any group as being a monolith, is a bigot. No ifs, no ands, no buts. All men, all women, all black people, all Dutch people, whatever is all the start of the same bigoted sentence. And "the left" does this every bit as much as "the right".
I am a transwoman against misandry and I wanna say you've got it figured out. People only think transwomen are dangerous because they think we're men, and we live in a society where "All men are predators, all women are victims."
But the misandrists are the Neo Liberals, The REAL Far Left tend to be more egalitarian.
The Woke Group is closer to being Neo-Liberal than actual Left
I'm a real Leftist, I don't care about policing language, I'm actually against it. What I want is Universal Healthcare and Trans Rights.
That wouldnt fall under** far **left, would it? Duh.
You said dud at the end so your argument is true.
Sorry I could believe this if it weren't for your right-wing chud reveal at the end. Also chuds tend to have pedo tendencies so I think you're misrepresenting what you were banned for; as much as I hate to give the benefit of the doubt to reddit's moderation team.
Yes, thank you for the example of what I was talking about. Very much appreciated.
What reveal? He just said he's tired of extremists
More free child labor in jails.
It is not the tool, but is the lazy stupid person that created the implementation. The same stupidity is true of people that run word filtering in conventional code. AI is just an extra set of eyes. It is not absolute. Giving it any kind of unchecked authority is insane. The administrators that implemented this should be what everyone is upset at.
The insane rhetoric around AI is a political and commercial campaign effort by Altmann and proprietary AI looking to become a monopoly. It is a Kremlin scope misinformation campaign that has been extremely successful at roping in the dopes. Don't be a dope.
This situation with AI tools is exactly 100% the same as every past scapegoated tool. I can create undetectable deepfakes in gimp or Photoshop. If I do so with the intent to harm or out of grossly irresponsible stupidity, that is my fault and not the tool. Accessibility of the tool is irrelevant. Those that are dumb enough to blame the tool are the convenient idiot pawns of the worst of humans alive right now. Blame the idiots using the tools that have no morals or ethics in leadership positions while not listening to these same types of people's spurious dichotomy to create monopoly. They prey on conservative ignorance rooted in tribalism and dogma which naturally rejects all unfamiliar new things in life. This is evolutionary behavior and a required mechanism for survival in the natural world. Some will always scatter around the spectrum of possibilities but the center majority is stupid and easily influenced in ways that enable tyrannical hegemony.
AI is not some panacea. It is a new useful tool. Absent minded stupidity is leading to the same kind of dystopian indifference that lead to the ""free internet"" which has destroyed democracy and is the direct cause of most political and social issues in the present world when it normalized digital slavery through ownership over a part of your person for sale, exploitation, and manipulation without your knowledge or consent.
I only say this because I care about you digital neighbor. I know it is useless to argue against dogma but this is the fulcrum of a dark dystopian future that populist dogma is welcoming with open arms of ignorance just like those that said the digital world was a meaningless novelty 30 years ago.
You seem to be handwaving all concerns about the actual tech, but I think the fact that "training" is literally just plagiarism, and the absolutely bonkers energy costs for doing so, do squarely position LLMs as doing more harm than good in most cases.
The innocent tech here is the concept of the neural net itself, but unless they're being trained on a constrained corpus of data and then used to analyze that or analogous data in a responsible and limited fashion then I think it's somewhere on a spectrum between "irresponsible" and "actually evil".
Okay sure but in many cases the tech in question is actually useful for lots of other stuff besides repression. I don't think that's the case with LLMs. They have a tiny bit of actually usefulness that's completely overshadowed by the insane skyscrapers of hype and lies that have been built up around their "capabilities".
With "AI" I don't see any reason to go through such gymnastics separating bad actors from neutral tech. The value in the tech is non-existent for anyone who isn't either a researcher dealing with impractically large and unwieldy datasets, or of course a grifter looking to profit off of bigger idiots than themselves. It has never and will never be a useful tool for the average person, so why defend it?
I am an average person, and my GPU is running a chatbot which currently gives me a course in Regular Expressions. My GPU also generates images for me from time to time when i need an image, because i am crappy at drawing. There are a lot of uses for the technology.
Okay so you could have just looked up one of dozens of resources on regex. The images you "need" are likely bad copies of images that already exist, or they're weird collages of copied subject matter.
My point isn't that there's nothing they can do at all, it's that nothing they can do is worth the energy cost. You're spending tons of energy to effectively chew up information already on the web and have it vomited back to you in a slightly different form, when you could have just looked up the information directly. It doesn't save time, because you have to double check everything. The images are also plagiarized, and you could be paying an artist if they're something important, or improving your artistic abilities if they aren't. I struggle to think of many cases where one of those options is unfeasible, it's just the "easy" way out (because the energy costs are obfuscated) to have a machine crunch up some existing art to get a approximation of what you want.
Regarding energy use see my other reply. It's like if you scold people for running their microwave 10s too long. Watching 2 hours of Netflix is a lot worse. go read up here
scraping the web to create a dataset isn't plagiarism, same with training a model on said scraped data, and calculating which words should come in what order isn't plagiarism too. I agree that datasets should be ethically sourced, but scraping the web is something that allowed such things as the search engine to be created, which made the web a lot more useful. Was creating google irresponsible?
This is a wild take. You can get chatbots to vomit out entire paragraphs of published works verbatim. There is functionally no mechanism to a chatbot other than looking at a bunch existing texts, picking one randomly, and copying the next word from it. There's no internal processing or logic that you could call creative, it's just sticking one Lego at a time onto a tower, and every Lego is someone's unpaid intellectual property.
There is no definition of plagiarism or copyright that LLMs don't bite extremely hard. They're just getting away with it because of the billions of dollars of capital pushing the tech. I am hypothetically very much for the complete abolition of copyright and free usage of information, but a) that means everyone can copy stuff freely, instead of just AI companies, and b) it first requires an actually functional society that provides for the needs of its citizens so they can have the time to do stuff like create art without needing to make a livable profit at it. And even if that were the case, I would still think the current implementation of AI is pretty shitty if it's burning the same ludicrous amounts of energy to do its parlor tricks.
The energy costs are overblown. An response costs about 3Wh, which is about 1 minute of runtime for a 200W Pc, or 10 Seconds of a 1000W microwave. See the calculations made here and below for the energy costs. if you want to save energy, go vegan and ditch your car; completely disbanding ChatGPT amounts for 0,0017% of the CO2 Reduction during Covid 2020 (this guy gave the numbers, but had an error in magnitude, which i fixed in my reply, calculator output is attached. It would help climate activists if they concentrated on something that is worthwhile to criticize.
If i read a book, and use phrases out of that book in my communication, it is covered under fair use - the same should be applicable for scraping the web, or else we can close the internet archive next. Since LLM output isn't copyrightable, i see no issues with that - and copyright law in the US is an abomination which is only useful for big companies to use as a weapon, small artists don't really profit from that.
The costs for responses are overblown, but the costs for training are not.
Adding the cost for training, which is a one time cost, to ChatGPT raises the power consumption from 3W to 4W. That's the high-end calculation btw.
That is crazy, dude. You gotta teach me. There are soo many impoverished countries I wanna fuck over with this skill.
What a great way to prepare students for our AI enabled social media and digital surveillance society. Take note kids, trust no one!
Seems like the Gaggle CEO has a good view. They're still an enabler in these situations. Be it poor guidance or training. With the impact they have, taking responsibility would be tracking and ceasing contracts that do not follow this soft response approach.
Human nature dictates we do things before we discuss if we should do things.
To me it starts getting into a philosophical discussion but unfortunately I don't think as a species we are mature enough yet to have these discussions.
A good real world example of this is in Canada the separation movement by Quebec vs. Alberta. In Quebec there have been years of open public discussion before they ultimately took a vote. They were painfully away of all the nuance that came from leaving Canada. They did it right to a large extent. Compare that to Daniella Smith in Alberta and she's hammering through the mechanisms for a vote to happen meanwhile the public has absolutely no understanding of the ramifications of if they do vote to leave Canada. They're doing it wrong.
Human nature by default seems to want to change the front tyre while doing 120 on the highway. This needs to change.
Imagine it's 1995 and you're an average person. You don't know all that much about separation, you just know that the coming referendum is about it and you don't want to separate. You likely are not a college/university graduate and a significant amount of the people you know haven't even graduated high school. You probably don't have a personal computer or internet access even if you do. Your primary news source is likely the odd updates you get on the radio while driving to or from work, and you haven't been following and aren't familiar with how people talk about separation. You show up to vote and you get this question:
What the hell are you even voting for or against here?
The Québec referendum on separation was so confusing people remarked they didn't actually know what they were voting for. The situation resulted in a law (Clarity Act) that forced all secession votes to pass some tests to be considered valid, and also indicated that a secession requires amendment of the Constitution of Canada, which makes it incredibly difficult to actually do.
I really don't want to give Québec undeserved credit on this, they handled it quite poorly tbh and the whole thing felt like it was exploiting the ignorance and anger of a minority population that had even less education and literacy than the average Canadian at the time. That said, Canada has since devolved further into being a neoliberal anglosohere shithole so perhaps they were on to something.
WTF America?
Surprised from that shithole?
Someone should tell the kids about Signal.
As for monitoring on school computers, that seems OK to me if it's disclosed to the students and parents in advance. What's problematic is the responses, which seem much more focused on ass-covering than student welfare. I imagine most 13 year olds have made jokes about killing people once or twice and any adult with common sense would be able to tell they're jokes.
I didn’t know Reddit admins were also school admins
The world is turning into one giant shitty customer service experience.
The next few years is going to be like the time Post Office employees were hounded and had their lives destroyed over what was later found to be a software fault and not mass Human corruption, but on a far grander scale.
Thought control
This is also why (I think) that younger people don't like going outside. Cameras are everywhere. There's no privacy. We've become a world of creeps. Not really for the most of us. But if I was 10 years old I'd think everyone as creeps.
Now corporations are forcibly creeping into the classrooms. Yuck!
“Sometimes you have to look at the trade for the greater good,” said Board of Education member Anne Costello in a July 2024 board meeting.
No no no no.
Exactly.
Its not even for the greater good: Ask for an example of chat control type laws leading to convictions and the only answer you will get is ”we cant discuss individual cases due to privacy / prejudice for a court case"
They want more slave labor. The greater good is enriching themselves.
LOL the land of the free.
"... Whoever told you that is your enemy"
Think it's the same people that talk about our glorious western democratic values™️.
You know, keeping those pesky refugees out, supporting genocide and wars.
What a shithole country.
They finally get to play GOD, rip out your brain, and let an AI torture it to the maximum extent possible for all eternity.
Optimized to torture you in more than one way. Take your dignity, break you down into every way possible to make you a bad person, then use that as leverage to make your suffering even worse.
I was already glad being out of school before widespread take-home laptops and required after-school logging in to check for homework and shit, but this AI-driven surveillance is on a whole other level. Sometimes I'm wondering if it's just me getting old and doing the old people thing thinking things were better "back in the day" but is this current state not objectively worse, being monitored so much and having no way to really disconnect from school?
Its not a technology issue, its a capitalism issue.
Idealy, people should be able to afford their own devices and just log in via a browser, but capitalism fucks everyone and kids are too poor to have their own laptop and has to use the school-issued one which is obviously managed and surveilled because they can't have you watching porn on it.
Also, #SaveSnowDays, stop forcing an online meet if its snowing and they cant get to school, just let kids have a day off once in a while.
I'm no fan of capitalism, but nothing in it requires public schools to install surveillance software on laptops. This seems purely like an administration issue, which is often the source of problems in general, not just in schools, but also in other sectors like healthcare, where they put in stupid policies while sucking up funding for themselves and their pet issues instead of towards the core purpose of that sector.
Agreed on the snow days. In fact, I think we should reduce the number of school days (and work days, for that matter) in general.
Citizen, Friend Computer has detected Bad Thought ^(tm)^ in your area! Please do not be alarmed! Remain where you are, a team of selected Troubleshooters will begin deploying Martin-Marietta neuron adjusters as quickly as possible.
Do not worry about side-effects: Martin-Marietta's studies have shown most people respond positively to having their neurons rewired! Plus it feels good.
Is this a Paranoia reference out in the wild? Amazing. Well done!
Heh, thanks. I see more and more similarity between Paranoia and the real world, as well as all the dystopian 1970s sci-fi I grew up on...
This is frustrating. Obviously it's not okay to make jokes like that and I even think some sort of punishment might be okay, but strip searching and jailing her overnight? You aren't creating someone who will think before they speak, you're making someone who will be paranoid of all legal processes and never trust any government official ever again for anything because they got fucking STRIP SEARCHED AND DETAINED OVERNIGHT over a really shitty joke.
To me this is equivalent to dropping bombs on the Middle East and expecting not to create a lot more terrorists. If she didn’t want to go shooting before maybe she wants to now.
It's ok to make jokes.
Unsurprising to me this is happening in schools, they've got to be ready for the low wage retail jobs many will have after graduation. A lot of places have been upgrading their phones to Zoom-enabled devices, which have the ability to record and summarize all employee conversations held near them for management or HR. I've worked in a couple places recently where it got rolled out and there were hints they were using it that way.
Anyone willing to call me paranoid, or supportive of the idea this tech is used this way or will be, please respond, retail isn't really full of many tech savvy people and I'm curious if I'm imagining the capability/use of this, or if others have had similar experiences.
Some people are really fucking ignorant.
Murica
School shootings? Nah, not really a problem, plus it's impossible, impossible i tell you, to solve that!
Students making jokes, however, now THAT is a problem we can solve right here and now! Those fuckers will learn their lesson.
REAPECT MAH AUTHORITAY
Gotta indoctrinate them into the surveillance state early. Gotta break them before they learn to resist.
I don't understand why she was arrested, her "threat" was obviously a joke. I guess jokes are illegal now
Well in Scotland they certainly are
Do you want to badly fuck up a society? Because that is how you badly fuck up a society.
I got a captcha on the archive, but was able to read the original just fine. I guess archives are not necessarily lower barrier.
Sounds more like they are maybe using ML classifiers on all the communications they are spying on by conventional means. To me that's not the same as using AI to spy but whatever.
Some good news here is that if they apply this to society as a whole the jails would be too full, keep saying the no-no words online!
Anything with a very low rate of true positives applied to a large population is going to have an insane false positive rate. EG a 1 in 7M issue applied to 70M students with a 1% false positive rate would produce 700k false positives. Worse people who are actually planning a school shooting may be more likely to avoid telegraphing their intentions. So you could damage 700k kids futures and traumatize them without even catching many or any of the killers.
I mean pretty stupid to write that in the schools chat app, use signal or shit just regular iMessage
Apparently another one got arrested within hours of a Snapchat too.
Damn kids gotta make everything public these days lol
Isn't this the plot of Shimoneta?
Hope the kids find the people responsible and do everything I know a teenager to be able to do to make their lives waking nightmares.
Shouldn't they have used AI to collect the messages and then have a human manually intervene?
put the phone down
when we're saying that if the group chat leaks, we end up in prison, it seems like it was true
When the memes become real life
AI is a virus
AI is a machine that cannot be held accountable and has no will.
Stop being distracted by the tool, look at the humans.
AI is all about the humans.
AI is the last to blame here:
this is a societywide issue, dont blame the bot.
I notice that none of these suggestions include any AI solutions. Could you please rephrase these to emphasize how AI might be a powerful aid in the fight against online bullying and police brutality?
For this scenario to happen a simple text filter that marks messages with the word "kill" would have been enough. that an LLM was involved is a distraction from the real issues.
I notice this suggestion doesn't include any AI solutions. Could you please rephrase to emphasize how effective an ally AI can be at identifying negative sentiments among large userbases?
Buzz off.
I just want to point out a lot of you actively support this if it helps curb “hate speech” or fascists or nazis or whatever. But what can be used against the guilty may be used against the innocent so it is best that we do not allow it at all. Either all speech is free or none of it is, there’s no other way.
Nope. It should be reviewed by a human, and the response should be proportionate.
Not just any human. It should be a board certified child psychologist. They would be one of the few who could recognize a legitimate threat/concern or bullying from a poor joke or a stressed-out kid just venting with an empty threat. And on a positive 'hit', should just be a visit from the counselor to see what's going on. IMO, psychologists should also be the only ones allowed to look at any of the info as they should know how to keep private conversations private if intervention is unnecessary.
The idea of the software does show some merits, but it is way, way too underdeveloped and grossly misused to be of any use.
i do not think you would find many people who actively support the use of artificial intelligence in the monitoring and moderating of hate speech or fascism. those things must be moderated and resisted by people who can be held accountable for mistakes or oversteps, not machines that can not be held accountable for anything.
Or we could have a legislation that would punish the companies that run these bullshit systems AND the authorities that allow and use them when they flop, like in this case.
Hey, dreaming is still free (don't know how much longer though).
The problem is a societal one. lets see:
This has gone through too many hands to even start blaming the companies. anyone in this chain had the opportunity to do the right thing (ok, maybe the teens didn't, they don't know any better). Noone did.
Surveillance shouldn't be so pervasive, but i have no issue with e.g. surveillance in a prison, maybe in a hospital (not in the patient rooms, but to make sure noone steals the good stuff or to make sure no patients are lost in a service tunnel), at a border, inside of police stations to make sure that prisoner rights are upheld, military bases for obvious reasons and so on.
Your society is the issue, and therefor surveillance is everywhere except where it would be useful.
You're evidently an apologist for these crappy companies.
2 or 3 parents can't do jack shit to avoid this, short of removing the kids from school and having them homeschooled.
There are 3 main factors that allow this shit to happen:
There is no way to justify any of the 3 factors as they exist today. These need to change if anything is to get better.
That there are parents that could be doing more to avoid this kind of shit? Absolutely. Will parents pushing for change do anything towards fixing it? Not if the other 3 factors don't play their part as well.
And the reason fucking kids are so fragile today is because of us allowing everything to be called "bullying". So, they joked about the tan, big fucking deal. Learn to take a fucking joke or go live in a cave.
Get fucking real.
nah, i don't like the companies myself, i run my models locally to be independent from them. Venture capital is trying to cram it everywhere, i agree on that point. But the issue in this case is that not one person in the long chain of people did care at all, not that a chatbot flagged the word "kill"; that would have happened with a simple word filter as well.
I also agree that your system is crap and you deserve a better government that cares for people, but since not enough people vote for people and parties like that, we must assume that the majority of voters in the US either dont care or WANT a strong leader to decide for them, they want surveillance to feel save (even tho it doesn't help with safety at all!), and that this majority is racist as well, or else the skin color of the girl wouldn't even be a conversation point. It was in the open for what Trump and Project 2025 stood - and they didn't even stop with the presidency, they gave him the senate too to make sure their agenda gets their way. The rest is simply a consequence of that - this society consists of indifferent, partly hateful, partly racist people.
Kids are brutal and often cruel, especially to their classmates. They brought a girl to the point where she hated the color of her skin so much that she made a "joke" to kill the ethnic group so she wouldn't be associated with that anymore. Here we are again: hateful, racist people have hateful, racist kids that bully others over skin color.
The solution? I'm not sure. It will take a lot of time and multiple generations; and it probably will only happen if the US loses a lot of it's power or breaks up into multiple states.
I kind of agree with you. Things in the US (and most of the rest of the world) have taken a turn for the worst. I've been digging into all that's been going on since January, and comparing it with how the nazi party came to be in power in Germany, and the similarities are scary, to say the least. Sure, it's towards other races more than anything, as well as religions, sexual preferences and other key differentiator, but the core is exactly the same. How the Nazi party got most Germans to believe that being German meant hating jews, blacks and who knows what else, and that's what made the holocaust so effective. Propaganda pushing hate and dividing the same country. If we go back in history, we can see all the same bullshit propaganda from those days today.
And, full disclosure, I am not opposed to countries controlling illegal immigration, as not doing so is extremely detrimental to any country, however, there is no need to completely destroy people (mentally, spiritually and sometimes even physically) to achieve these goals.
It is as you say. Americans are focused on the lie that surveillance will make them safer, and this government has exacerbated that exponentially in just half a year, using fear as the tool, and fear of immigrants, LGBT people, any skin color difference, and many more.
Now, let's look at the other side of this. By promoting all this crap, the US has managed to make previous allies look at the possibility of moving to the other side. China, Russia, India and a few more countries have all but created their own "UN", and contrary to what the media is showing us, they are actually flourishing, which points to a dramatic shift in global politics.
The UK, EU and Australia are leading the surveillance regimes, even for the US (visa, mastercard and steam are US companies, and all 3 were bullied into submission by a fucking Australian NGO, fucking up millions of US gamers in the process, and the authorities of the US haven't even blinked, WTF?), which is building rapidly into a distrust climate among all allies (assuming they still are).
This is way more complex than war, surveillance, racism, xenophobia and finances, this is the decline of the Roman Empire all over again, bringing with it all the disasters to civilization that comes with this fall.
Money as we knew it doesn't exist anymore (it hasn't been based in gold for decades now, and now there is no physical base for it either), values have been stripped from morals in every single community (religious or not), existing weapons could destroy every living being on the planet within a couple of hours, and everyone seems to be blindly following so-called "leaders" that are only looking after their own benefits (and I'm talking about every facet of our civilization: business, work, families, governments, nobody gives a fuck about the common wellbeing anymore).
From my perspective, it falls on each of us to take the best care possible of our families, if and when we achieve this, do the same for our immediate communities, and if that pans out, then each of our countries. But I'm not counting on any "leader" to do what is needed to reverse the downward spiel the whole world is in right now. At this rate, we're all just going to crash and burn.
Sorry for the horrible and long rant, I am extremely frustrated watching the world my kids will have to try to survive in, and the feeling of helplessness is overwhelming.
We all know teachers are the laziest people known to man...
Teachers are generally awesome. But school boards and superintendents are almost stereotypically control freaks; and that's who sets this stuff up. There are plenty of good ones too, but it's not nearly as selfless a group as teachers.
I was kinda being ironic... but yep