纽约禁止六十万中小学生在校用 AI：反对的人说，这还不够

Let's start with a number: six hundred thousand.

On September the second, New York City announced that six hundred thousand primary and middle school students may no longer use AI at school.

New York runs the largest school system in America, and those six hundred thousand are roughly two-thirds of it.

From pre-K all the way to eighth grade, everyone is covered.

In scale, this is the furthest any American district has gone so far.

To understand it, you first need to know what has been happening in schools these past two years.

AI arrived in schools fast.

Some products teach children to read, correcting a mispronounced word on the spot.

Some are chat companions — a child with something on their mind can tell it to the machine.

And when there is homework, you ask, the answer appears, and it will write it up for you as well.

The companies selling these products have had one line for years: this is the future of education, and it cannot be stopped.

The mayor, announcing the policy, answered that line head-on.

He said: the tech industry wants us to believe that AI-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary.

He said: we do not see it that way.

So what exactly got switched off?

First, the AI tools schools issued to students are shut down entirely.

One reading-tutor AI that had been running a long while was stopped along with the rest.

Second, companion chatbots that talk with students may not be installed on school devices at all.

Even one large company's general AI assistant was disabled on school computers.

Third, screen time got pulled in as well.

Eight to ten-year-olds: thirty minutes a day recommended.

Eleven to thirteen: forty-five minutes.

For younger children, one-to-one screen time is tighter still.

There is one arrangement here that sounds strange the first time you hear it.

Students cannot use it; teachers can.

Teachers may use AI to prepare lessons and handle administrative work, as long as the tool itself is safe.

Why the difference?

New York's logic is actually quite clear.

A teacher's judgement is already formed; AI saves them time, and that time goes back to the students.

An eight-year-old's judgement is still forming.

What they need to practise at this stage is learning how to think a thing through.

If AI finishes a seven-year-old's homework, what exactly did the seven-year-old practise?

It is not a blanket ban either.

Several groups of students may still use it.

Students with disabilities use AI as assistive technology — it reads for them, it speaks for them.

Students who have just arrived in America and whose English is still weak may use it.

And older students taking computing courses, who may go into the field, are unaffected.

Over the coming year, New York has taken on a fairly laborious job.

Every technology product in use in the schools gets reviewed again.

The standard is whether the thing is genuinely essential to learning.

Anything that is not essential gets dropped.

The review looks at whether the vendor is accountable, whether there are ethical problems, whether it actually helps teaching, whether there is research behind it, and what teachers and students say after using it.

Five pilots have been kept at high school level, running only vetted tools.

And this last point may run against your instinct.

The people criticising New York are objecting from a direction you might not expect.

They say a year is too short.

One group opposed to AI in schools says that keeping high school pilots at all is dangerous in itself.

They say those products still have no clear evaluation, and parents have no clear way to opt out.

So the two sides of this are: tech companies saying it cannot be stopped, and parent groups saying it has not been stopped nearly enough.

New York has put itself in the middle, and given itself one year.

Think about it: when you were small there was a problem you thought about for a long time before it came clear.

If something had been sitting right there that gave you the answer the moment you asked, would you have thought about it that long?