By Jessica Winter
Publication Date: 2026-04-23 10:00:00
The message from the White House – and often from tech companies and public schools – is that Figure 03 and its AI militias are irrevocably here and belong everywhere, and we should feel scared but also “empowered,” and that hopefully, perhaps, the more time and resources we give them, the less they will hurt us. Last month, the New York City Department of Education began soliciting public feedback on its interim guidelines for the use of AI in K-12 classrooms, which include this admonition: “The question is not whether AI belongs in schools. The question is whether we will collectively build a system that governs AI to serve every student and every stakeholder.”
It’s quite a rhetorical suplex – opening a debate by declaring its central premise off-limits. But as we know from hallucinating chatbots, just saying something doesn’t mean you’re saying something. Countless studies have sowed doubts about the value of AI in educational environments. “The integration of LLMs into…
