The Rush To Put AI in Schools

big Apple fanboys. Every new iPhone that comes out there on top of it, you know, they're on it like white on rice. And one of the ways in which I am most a luddite is my general attitude of despising new developments in the realm of artificial intelligence chat, GPT, all of these different manifestations of AI that you're seeing now being promoted in various kinds of contexts, whether it's helping people to write stuff, whether it's helping people to

you know, help. Basically, one of the main uses of AI is helping students to cheat by writing exams for them. But then businesses try to I don't know, it's like this this or eg earnest desire to just want to be in on the next cool thing, the next cool tech thing, and want to be like, oh, I'm doing

this thing too, I'm utilizing this thing. And it seems like everyone is looking at AI and trying to think, is there some way I can shoehorn this into my business because it's the cool, hip, trendy thing to do. And I have found most of the uses of AI to be stupid. I don't like it. I dislike what it could mean down the road for all kinds of industries. I think anyone in the radio industry should look at AI with with deep suspicion. I think that, you know,

I think that certainly. My sister is an animator who works for Disney, and she's worked on a bunch of different, you know, prominent Disney animated films, and she and the union she's a part of is very very concerned with AI. Writers in Hollywood very concerned about AI replacing all their jobs. Animators very concerned about AI being utilized to sort of replace their jobs. I basically and generally, I just dislike

the idea of outsourcing our brains to something else. For so much of this stuff, I just feel like it's things that our own brain could do on its own if we just did a little more work. I sort of there's this one part in The Lord of the Rings where and JR. Tolkien is I think, Jerry. It's sometimes in life you come across someone who you think is so right about so much and grasps the truth so clearly, whether maybe it's in your field or something,

that you just kind of become that person's disciple. And Tolkien is that person for me. He has this one section in The Lord of the Rings where the characters the Hobbits come home at the end of their adventures to the Shire and they see that some bad stuff has happened. One of the bad characters, Sarah Man, has clandestinely slunk back to the shire and is sort of

ruining it out of spite. And one of the things done was creating a new Instead of the river houred mill that was used for grinding wheat, they produced some new monstrosity with wheels and engines that was billowing smoke, and the Hobbits sort of looked at it with disgust because it was needlessly complicated, noisy, pollutive, and technologically advanced when they had no more wheat to grind than they had before, and a lot of AI feels to me like that scene. A lot of AI feels to me

like this isn't making your problems simpler. This leads me to a story about California public schools. Now, if there's any kind of entity that you can really really snooker into wasting a bunch of money on some dumb tech project, government entities are probably a good bet, and school districts probably are a pretty good bet. For this story from cal Matters, California's two biggest school districts botched AI deals. Here are lessons from their mistakes with all the hubris

of a startup founder. Alberto Carvallo, the superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District, took to the stage in March to launch ed the chatbot. He told parents and students it had quote the potential to personalize the educational journey at a level never before seen in this district, across the country, or around the world. No other technology can deliver real time on this promise, he said, we know

it will succeed. In June, after only three three months and nearly three million dollars, the district shelved ed following layoffs. Of more than half of the staff at all here the startup company that made this controversial AI, Assistant district spokesperson Britt Vaughan refused to answer questions about the bots' performance or say how many students and parents used it

before the shutdown. Also in June, and AI controversy unfolded in San Diego, where school board members reportedly weren't aware that the district last summer bought a tool that automatically suggests grades for writing assignments actually grades for writing assignments. The dust up began after Point Loma High School teacher Jen Roberts told Cal Matters that using the tools saved her time and reduced burnout, but also gave students the

wrong grades sometimes times. A week later, Voice of San Diego quoted two members of the school board saying they were unaware the district had signed a contract involving AI. In fact, no one on the board seemed to know about the tool, the media. The news outlets said since it was included as part of a broader contract with Hofton Mifflin that was approved unanimously with no discussion, alongside more than seventy other items. None of those school board

members responded to cal Matter's request for comments. San Diego Unified School District spokesperson Michael Murrad said that since AI is a quickly evolving technology, quote, we will make an increased effort to inform more members of additional relevant details

related to contracts presented to them in the future. Mistakes in LA and San Diego may trace back to growing pressure on educators to adopt AI and underline the need for decision makers to ask more and tougher questions about such products before buying them, said people who work at the intersection of education and technol Yeah, no kidding, here's

a tough question. Why even go down this road? Sorry, our kids in LA Unified doing so well that we have the time to spend on such time and money to spend on such luxuries as AI chat bots to assist parents see this is the most common use of AI. The most common use of AI that I've seen has been for tech support, help support, customer support. And it frustrates me to no end because inevitably AI sucks at that.

You know what you need, you need a human being, and companies providing some form of customer service for their products. You know whether it's a school district trying to help parents navigate something with their kids' education, which purportedly is what this, uh, the chatbot that la Unified was trying to do. Whether it's that or just you know, me trying to figure out some PayPal thing that I'm trying to set up for my business. This I encountered this

a couple of weeks ago. I was trying to set up something with like a PayPal charitable account for it was either for Right to Life or for Obria, And I was having all these problems with it, and I try to like, how do I call a human being to ask them what the problem is? And what do I get directed to? Well, I get directed to an AI chatbot, and I tried to describe the problem. They're there, and they're they're all hyping up a.

sucks at that. But it's also like the idea. This story from San Diego unified that teachers were using AI to grade written exams or written papers like essays and stuff like that. And so this teacher tells cal Matters, Oh, it helps me avoid burnout. Everyone's burnout, burnout, Pull up your socks, put on your big boy pants. Jeez, luise, you're a teacher. The job of being a teacher means

grading essays. That's the job. If you're not gonna do that, And this teacher saying, well, it helps me avoid burnout, but you know, God forbid, I have to do my job. But it does sometimes give kids the wrong grade. Maybe it's given every kid the wrong grade. What so you just sort of use this and then when a kid comes to you and says, hey, this, you gave me a D on this paper. I think it was better

than a D, Like like, what are you doing? Oh, so you'll you'll bump up the grades that it wrongly gives a low grade to But kids who are given an A for you know, some low level effort, you're not going to adjust those I'm pretty sure. So half of these kids are going to get overinflated grades because it was an AI bot thing that graded their paper rather than a human being who can exercise judgment. Also, by the way, probably half these kids are using AI

themselves to cheat to write the stupid essays. So I find Look, if private businesses want to utilize AI in various ways to some extent, that's up to them. But I do not take a totally libertarian approach to this stuff. I think AI has all kinds of capacity to massively disrupt the economy. And I'm not using that word favorably. Okay,

Sometimes people are like, oh, he's an economic disruptor. A disruptor. No, Like, if you're going to introduce AI whole sale into some industry, that's going to result in a whole bunch of people being laid off. That's a question for the government to maybe step in and sort of approach this and regulate it. Yes, the federal government can approach this, Okay. If AI is directly impacting part of interstate commerce. That is something that

Congress should get involved in. If it's impacting businesses within the state of California, it's something that the state legislature should get heavily involved in. All right, Sorry, Libertarians, I think it's okay for the government to make laws about things because I I just genuinely think people matter, people working jobs matter. There is an economic there is constantly.

What we're seeing in our changing tech logical landscape is a constant desire on the part of corporations to go from American workers to foreign workers, whether foreign workers who come across the border to get here, or foreign workers working at a call center in India somewhere, or moving to factory from America to China to zero workers. And that move Libertarians often herald as, oh, well, well, if they couldn't get the same work for cheaper price, that's

the invisible hand of the market. That's fine. Meanwhile, the Midwest manufacturing blue collar sector is completely devastated. The impact of this on our country. Over the last forty years of jobs moving away from America moving overseas, are supply chains becoming more reliant on China. There are macro serious problems that occur as a result of the micro individual decisions of these companies to shift away from American workers. If those kinds of shifts happen in the realm of AI,

I think it is equally concerning. All right. When we returned out, I'll go back to talking about education and my rant about all technology in education that is next on the John Girardi Show. Story from cow Matters. You can get it go twitter dot com, slash Fresno, Johnny at Frozno. Johnny tweeted about it from my Twitter account about how LA Unified got basically blew three million dollars

on some useless AI chatbot. San Diego Unified apparently was paying for an AI tool that allowed teachers to grade written assignments like essays and stuff without having to do any work, and it was giving some students the wrong grades. And it makes me think more generally about technology and education. And you know, as for our context, the Girardi family,

we are homeschooling the Girardi School. Oh home Learning just kicked off its twenty twenty four twenty five school year on Monday because Holly was sick and tired of these kids. It's too hot for them to really play outside for much of the day because it's like one hundred and ten degrees outside and people were whiney, and so Holly was like, that's it. These people are doing school. So we've got fourth grade, fourth grade, Maddie third grade. So

what are we fifth grade? Fourth grade? Anyway, We've got eight year old Maddie. No, we got nine year old Maddie, seven year old Sophie, six year old Jack getting started with school, first, fourth and fifth grade. That's what we are. Okay, there we go first, fourth and fifth grade and our home schooling. It's not like we're zero tech involved. We're you know, we're doing homeschooling through like a public charter thing. So I think Maddie and Sophie have like a Chrome

book that they can use. It's mostly we are trying to teach the girls how to type, you know, make sure that they can learn how to type decently well. And they have used the chromebooks for like one or two assignments. But they're ninety nine nine percent of their work based on the curricula that we are employing for them. It is not going to be based in computers. It just isn't it. Doesn't need to be this urge by public school districts to and private schools. This afflicts private schools,

Catholic schools. I've seen this throughout the region, this urge to want to have technology for all the kids, like in mandatory that all the kids have to have a laptop, mandatory that all the kids have to have an iPad. I just don't like it. Like, like, I remember there was a one private school K three private school locally that was advertising the fact that every kid's gonna have an iPad for school. I'm like, wow, I don't want that. That seems like a terrible idea. I just find this

so unnecessary. Yes, kids should learn to type, but you know what's at the end of the day not gonna kill a third grader is writing a five paragraph essay out by hand. It's not gonna kill her. And also, you know what the benefit is when you have to write out an essay by hand. It helps actually develop your skills with handwriting, teach the kids cursive, et cetera. I just find the rush the need to utilize technology

in education. I just don't think it has almost I just don't think it has much of a benefit at all, and you look at educational outcomes from today versus forty years ago, and clearly we're not moving in the right direction. It's not like, you know, we've adopted how many millions and millions of dollars of technology, or let's just look at any individual kid. Okay, in the state of California, we now spend over twenty thousand dollars per student per

academic year. That's a tax burden. It's over twenty thousand dollars per student per year for a California public school, and a lot of that is paying for teachers and administrators. But there's also all this technology apparatus in schools that are being sustained, and I just don't think it's really helping.

And so I guess when I hear of school districts blowing money on AI chatbots and AI grading tools and how can we integrate AI, when really it just seems like this is like the current fad, This is like the current exciting thing that's happening in technology, and these school districts just want to be cool. They want to be like, oh, we're in on the game. Why the task of teaching this second or third grader his multiplication

tables has not changed over the last seventy years. He doesn't need AI, he doesn't need laptop, he doesn't need any extensive technology. We just find it so frustrating when I look at the incredibly low tech fashion in which my kids are learning just by homeschooling through the charter school that you know, the charter school, which gives us, you know, it's a great deal. I mean, it's a public school, but they give us broad discretion with the approval of you know, the teachers who are sort of

supervising it, to pick our own curriculum. So we were able to pick this really good curriculum, solid kind of more classical based curriculum. We can buy religion books and stuff on our own on the side, and we're so we're able to buy a great curriculum that gives the kids a huge emphasis on reading, on writing, learning how to write. My fourth and fifth grade are starting Latin this year. I can I mean, I have the benefit that I was Latin major in college, so I can

teach them. And it's so low tech, and my kids are doing great, like they're real smart cookies. There every standardized tests, there are always ninety whatever percentile, like it's not a high tech thing. And the school district gives us thirty two hundred bucks per kid per year for buying books and educational materials, and you know, and the money could we can also use the money towards you can't use the money on anything. You can use the

money towards sports leagues. You can use the money towards various kinds of educational things, like like like going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We can use the charter money for that. We can use it for books, we can use it for educational materials, sports things, et cetera. So it's been great, but it's super low tech. It's the rush to have more tech and education just seems so stupid, and of course the biggest California public school districts are

blowing money on it left and right. When we return the bizarre story from a week or so ago about the death penalty being taken off the table then maybe put back on the table for some of the nine to eleven terrorists, I want to explain some of that

from a legal perspective. Next on The John Girardi Show, the United States throughout the course of the War on Terror, was faced with some difficult questions about what to do with persons captured on the battlefield in the course of the War on Terror, because it was kind of these terrorist groups and these terrorists themselves were sort of this new category where we weren't exactly sure what to do with them. On the one hand, I mean, they're certainly

not like an American criminal law defendant. We know exactly what to do with a criminal law defendant in America. If you're in the United States and you commit a murder, there's a process for how we deal with it. We have a whole criminal justice system set up for Okay, you get arrested, you have these are the sort of due process rights that you have as an American, and this is what we do with you. If you commit a crime here but you're not a citizen, their processes

for deportation, whatever. There's so there's the criminal law process. But these terrorists that we're fighting, that maybe we capture on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq, or that we

pick up in Pakistan or whatever. So when we haven't killed these terrorists are not American criminal defendants, and are they entitled to the same due process protections that you know, if I if I as an American citizen here on you know, terra firma on US soil right here, if I allegedly commit a crime, I'm entitled to all kinds of due process protection them entitled to a lawyer, I'm entitled this, I'm titled that I've writ to a speedy trial. Blah

blah blah. You have to have habeas corpus. There are all kinds of protections for me. But do we want to afford all of that to terrorists? Well, there is another way to kind of treat them, which is the laws surrounding the capture of enemy combatants during war. But the United States sort of realized, well that that doesn't even really apply. These are not like state actors, These

are not uniformed military foes. Okay, And again this is we know what to do in the context of all right, it's the Battle of the Bulge, and you capture a group of Nazis and you put them in a pow camp, and then you have a process for how you're going to try them, and there's processes. Are you going to release them? Are you gonna try them for war crimes? What are you going to do. There's a process there.

You understand what their do process rights are that they're all kinds of bodies, bodies of international law that sort of deal with how do you treat these people. The problem in the United States faced was we had this body of terrorists who were sort of in this murky middle for which there wasn't any real clear designation. Some of these guys were taken to were picked up by the CIA and taken to black sites in different places around the world, and a lot of them wound up

in Guantanamo Bay. Why, well, Guantanamo Bay is this bizarre thing as far as geography and jurisdiction. It's totally under the control of the military. It's not under the control of any individual American state, and that sort of it sort of represents the America. The United States government basically saying, okay, well, we are not gonna let people in here come under the enforcement of any individual state or federal criminal law jurisdiction.

We gotta hold these guys. But then there comes the question of, well, we're just gonna hold these guys indefinitely, But what is our plan with these people? You can't let them go. They're ruthless, dangerous terrorists. There's no foreign government to negotiate with for them, no foreign government that

claims them as their soldier. Okay, again, this isn't a German soldier that we kidnap during the Battle of the Bulge, and we can negotiate with the German government or the success or German government whatever for his or her release. What do you do with this person? Are we just gonna indefinitely detain this person for the rest of his life or Also, here's the other question, do we execute him?

The story in the New York Times, it's been not the New York Times, but that's been in the media has been dealing with what is the United States gonna do with colleague Sheikh Mohammed? The guy is one of the masterminds of the nine to eleven attack. Okay, so this guy murdered almost three thousand people on nine to eleven, he orchestrated it. Do we execute him? Do we give him the death penalty? Well, do we give him the death penalty without a trial? I mean that you kind

of can't do that, right. There has to be some kind of judicial process before you just execute somebody. Even the idea of detaining this person for the rest of his or her life. Shouldn't that be done with some kind of process, like some kind of judicial process whereby we definitively convict this person of the crime of or the war crime or whatever of orchestrating the nine to eleven attacks. But what does that judicial process look like?

How should it look? Should it? Again, we fully understand that colleague Sheik Muhammad maybe is not entitled to all the same due process protections of an American citizen accused of, you know, accused of a dui in Mobile Alabama. Okay, an American citizen accused of a dui and Mobile Alabama is entitled to have an attorney entitled to this protection, that protection, you know, being able to see the witnesses

against it. There's this whole panoply of rights, some in the Constitution itself that protect the Fifth Amendment rights, sixth Amoris, all this stuff that protects an American criminal law defendant. Do we apply all that to some terrorists? Who again is we don't give all of those due process rights to prisoners of war. We have certain standards we have to obey with prisoners of war, So we have to

have some so how does this all work? So basically, the United States developed some kind of system of a military trial, some kind of military tribunal trial system apply which they are applying to actors like this. Now here's the problem is that in this system, these guys were given defense attorneys, and these defense attorneys did bring up or made the allegation anyway that some of these guys

were subjected to enhanced interrogation methods. And what's been happening for a long time has been some kind of plea deal.

There's been the examination of a plea deal because these guys have been these guys have been held in Guantanamo Bay for like twenty years now, and this process has been one long procedural kicking of cans down the road over the course of that time of trying to a figure out what the heck we were gonna even do with these guys to begin with, and then the trial process taking a long time, a lot of it having

a lot of influence based on who was in power. Now, it came out about a week ago that the two sides in this adjudication had reached a plea deal whereby Khalid Sheik Muhammad would not get the death penalty, but would get a life sentence in Guantanamo. Now in Guantanamo this is one of the absurd things about Guantanamo Bay.

Barack Obama came into office pledging he would shut down Guantanamo Bay, and this was in an anti Bush posture, trying to characterize Guantanamo Bay as this massive human rights violation.

Then Obama gets into office, actually sees all the classified stuff he wasn't seeing when he was candidate Obama and realizes he can't shut down Guantanamo Bay, that the guys in Guantanamo Bay are so frickin' dangerous, and there's basically no other place to put these guys where that anywhere else you put them is under some other country or American States jurisdiction. So he kind of asked to keep him in Guantanamo Bay. Plus the guys incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay,

like college chick Muhammad. That was one of the conditions of this proposed plea deal was I'll take the plea deal to not have to not be executed. I'll accept life in prison, but you need to keep me here on Guantanamo Bay because the conditions there are actually pretty decent. At this point, they're pretty decent. Now the BS nature

of this story. This is how the story went. It was announced about a week or two ago that in this military court process, colleague Shaik Mohammad has reached a plea deal with government prosecutors to he's gonna plead guilty. They take the death penalty off the table, but it'll

serve the rest of his life in Guantanamo Bay. So the Barack Obama ideal of closing down Guantanamo Bay, which it's clear kind of Biden was maybe also sort of hoping to do because Biden wants to be the president who ended the war on tear that that ain't happening

because we got to keep Kaleigu shake Mohammad there. So it's announced that this plea deal happens, Republicans attack the Biden administration Biden Harris and say what, you took the death penalty off the table for the guy who orchestrated nine to eleven and killed three thousand people. All these damaging attack ads against you know, all these damaging accusations against Biden Harris. Biden is the executive, so he one hundred percent can oversee and direct what goes on with

this prosecution of these terrorists. Okay, Biden one hundred percent has controlled There's no such thing as federal criminal law enforcement that's independent of the president, So it's the president can do this via the Secretary of Defense. So that story broke like two weeks ago of a plea deal. A week later, the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, comes out and says, oh, the prosecutors agree to this without consulting me first, and I rescind this plea deal. Yeah right,

all right, So let me get this straight. You mean to tell me that this bizarre military tribunal set up, which is directly under the military, under the Secretary of Defense, to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the guy who orchestrated the greatest, the single, biggest, worst terrorist attack in world history, who is in Guantanamo Bay, maybe the most the highest profile terrorists still alive, responsible for the death of three thousand New Yorkers and the people who died in Pennsylvania and

the people who died at the Pentagon. You mean to tell me, oh, that Lloyd Austin didn't know about this plea deal. No, he knew they were letting families of nine to eleven victims know that this plea deal was coming. President Biden knew if they, even if they hadn't seen the exact document, they knew this was coming. And by the way, I'm not even that big of a fan of the death penalty, but this is a cya for the politics of the presidential election. When we return the

vibes election next on the John Girardi Show. A more and more commonplace bit of gen Z slang that I keep hearing as a old fart millennial is the word vibes. It's not that you actually know that something is a certain way, but it gives off that vibe vibes. Oh, my gosh, this is so vibes, the vibes of this, vibes of that. The more I think about the Tim Walls selection as VP, and actually so much of American politics, he's being portrayed as moderate, nothing about him is moderate.

This whole panoply of policy positions he's taken. He's very aggressively left wing. But because he's a fat, old white guy who wears a suit from the Midwest, he just kind of gives off the vibe that he must be more moderate, so therefore he is. It's like how Nancy Mace gives the vibe of being an extreme right winger when actually she's much more liberal than I am. It's idiotic. That'll do it for John Girardi Show. See you next time on Power Talk.