no paywall archive.md/1lSRA
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!
Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations
Submitted 1 day ago by moe90@feddit.nl to technology@lemmy.world
https://fortune.com/2025/08/07/schools-ai-surveillance-students-children-arrested-jokes/
Comments
Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub 1 hour ago
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
What is sad is that an environment like this ruins someone’s mental health and ironically increasing the overall risk of violence.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 5 hours ago
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.
Kissaki@feddit.org 3 hours ago
“I wish that was treated as a teachable moment, not a law enforcement moment,” said Patterson.
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.
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
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.
CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
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:
Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
French:
Acceptez-vous que le Québec devienne souverain, après avoir offert formellement au Canada un nouveau partenariat économique et politique, dans le cadre du projet de loi sur l’avenir du Québec et de l’entente signée le 12 juin 1995?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.
Aggravationstation@feddit.uk 5 hours ago
Ha, its now a crime for kids to say dumb shit. Messed up, but its genius really, raising a generation who’s afraid to say anything that even vaguely rocks the boat and will go along with whatever the status quo enforced by social media is.
CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
I cannot possibly imagine trusting a school issued device.
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
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.
- The kids for bullying her for her tan
- The school boards implementing the surveillance
- The parents who allowed such surveillance in the first place
- The person screening what was flagged for not sending the school counselor to talk with the kid
- The person calling the cops
- The cops for arresting an 8th-grader and DOING A STRIP SEARCH AND KEEPING HER OVERNIGHT WTF instead of handing her over to her parents
Everyone of them failed a 13 year old girl. All of them should be ashamed.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
The cops for arresting an 8th-grader
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)
CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
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:
- 5000 rounds of ammunition
- body armor
- explosives
- only thing he couldn’t get was legal firearms because of his history of mental illness, but he had been working on connections to acquire illegal ones
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.
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
They love overreacting to small problems.
It’s what they do instead of reacting to major problems in any way.
JennyLaFae@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
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.
sik0fewl@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
Ya, AI is not the story here.
2910000@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Students who think they are chatting privately among friends often do not realize they are under constant surveillance
This is the problem
Aggravationstation@feddit.uk 4 hours ago
Yea, if nothing else hopefully this will make at least a few kids think about online privacy.
AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
There is something fundamentally fucked up in a country that arrests and puts in jail a 13 years old kid over a bad joke.
Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
But can’t put the pedo convicted felon grifter behind bars…
huquad@lemmy.ml 23 hours ago
You don’t understand, they are brown \s
muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 9 hours ago
Are schools not government organisations (in most cases) and would they not be subject to the first amendment?
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
The first amendment is not absolute - things like threats are not protected speech. Although I agree that in this case 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 dismiss a credible threat” or something equally bullshit…
artyom@piefed.social 14 hours ago
The result of "no tolerance policies".
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 7 hours ago
More free child labor in jails.
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
LOL the land of the free.
redhat421@lemmy.world 50 minutes ago
“… Whoever told you that is your enemy”
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 10 minutes ago
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.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 1 day ago
With the help of artificial intelligence, technology can dip into online conversations and immediately notify both school officials and law enforcement.
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 professionals 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.
Boddhisatva@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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 professionals here, not the police) go through the positives first.
The idea behind the policy is to stop school shootings. If there were a legitimate threat of violence, you would likely want the police to be notified as soon as possible. The issue here is that the authorities are letting a piece of half-ass code (Read: AI) decide what is a legitimate threat and, worse still, acting on that determination without question.
They have literally sacrificed an essential freedom for some temporary, and probably illusory, security.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Man, if only there was a good way to stop school shooting
Alas, one can only dream
6nk06@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
the policy is to stop school shootings
You should try Europe once. It’s more fun than your 3rd world country.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 1 day ago
The police are not effective at dealing with school shootings.
db2@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Authorities be like “aww shoot, not again.”
damnedfurry@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The issue here is that the authorities are letting a piece of half-ass code (Read: AI) decide what is a legitimate threat and, worse still, acting on that determination without question.
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.
verdigris@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
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.
kalkulat@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Lots of wannabe authoritarians out there in educationland.
krunklom@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
I couldn’t agree more.
It’s fucking pathetic.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
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 ^™^ Brain Beams until your attitude improves.
Ontimp@feddit.org 19 hours ago
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.
peetabix@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 17 hours ago
I am Canadian, how can I help? Because this shit is coming to Canada, too.
redwattlebird@lemmings.world 8 hours ago
WTF America?
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Surprised from that shithole?
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
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.
NotSteve_@piefed.ca 1 day ago
The US will do anything and everything except try proper gun control
BetaBlake@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Proper gun control? Nah let’s spy on kids
SugarCatDestroyer@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
No, rather, to monitor future slaves so that they are obedient.
Kissaki@feddit.org 3 hours ago
no paywall archive.md/1lSRA
I got a captcha on the archive, but was able to read the original just fine. I guess archives are not necessarily lower barrier.
Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
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.
bold_atlas@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Sorry I could believe this if it were for the 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.
zbyte64@awful.systems 12 hours ago
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?
prex@aussie.zone 11 hours ago
I would argue that universal healthcare, trans rights and taxing billionaires are not far left, but Im not American.
Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
That wouldnt fall under** far **left, would it? Duh.
Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Example of far left: packaged-media.redd.it/…/m2-res_480p.mp4?m=DASHPl…
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says.
Earlier in the day, her friends had teased the teen about her tanned complexion and called her “Mexican,” even though she’s not. When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.”
Zak@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
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.
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 10 hours ago
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.
wuffah@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
What a great way to prepare students for our AI enabled social media and digital surveillance society. Take note kids, trust no one!
xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 1 day ago
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 sun glasses worn after dark and slicked back hair. If they’re going to ask my for ‘ze papers’ all the time, the least they can do is look cool. 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.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
I mean, where’s the towering brutalist architecture?
I think China is doing a good job at that.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
Can’t they at least smoke cigarettes in a cool and threatening manner?!
xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 23 hours ago
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.
treadful@lemmy.zip 22 hours ago
Mom, can we have Equilibrium at home?
xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 22 hours ago
“ICE reached out to both Mr. Bale and Mr. Bean, but regrettably, neither were interested in the job.”
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
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.
Kyrgizion@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de 16 hours ago
Nah, dark humor is like a child with cancer, it never gets old.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
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.
dil@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
Yeah especially around middle school, the “darker” the “joke” the more funny it was
j4k3@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
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 to 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 they 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 I’m 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 populist dogma is welcoming with open arms of ignorance just like those that said the digital world was a meaningless novelty 30 years ago.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
I can create undetectable deepfakes in gimp or Photoshop.
That is crazy, dude. You gotta teach me. There are soo many small governments I wanna fuck over with this skill.
verdigris@lemmy.ml 20 hours 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”.0
SugarCatDestroyer@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
If the world is ruled by psychopaths who seek absolute power for the sake of even more power, then the very existence of such technologies will lead to very sad consequences and, perhaps, most likely, even to slavery. Have you heard of technofeudalism?
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
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?
SugarCatDestroyer@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
In such a world, hoping for a different outcome would be just a dream. You know, people always look for the easy way out, and in the end, yes, we will live under digital surveillance, like animals in a zoo. The question is how to endure this and not break down, especially in the event of collapse and poverty. It’s better to hope for the worst and be prepared than to look for a way out and try to rebel and then get trapped.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Another school shooting avoided! Just kidding, we just tortured a child for fun.
thejml@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
Which kinda seems like a villain origin story to me.
ThatGuy46475@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I didn’t know Reddit admins were also school admins
cdf12345@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
“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.
FuckFascism@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
So the police sexually assaulted a minor?
SugarCatDestroyer@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
It seems that Big Brother is wathing you… But now it’s already a reality, oh and what will happen if someone commits a thoughtcrime?
BD89@lemmy.sdf.org 40 minutes ago
Thought control