Submitted 8 months ago by moe90@feddit.nl to technology@lemmy.world
https://fortune.com/2025/08/07/schools-ai-surveillance-students-children-arrested-jokes/
no paywall archive.md/1lSRA
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.
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.
What reveal? He just said he’s tired of extremists
Yes, thank you for the example of what I was talking about. Very much appreciated.
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?
Sadly people get Tankies, Neo-Liberals and the Real Left mixed up
Example of far left: packaged-media.redd.it/…/m2-res_480p.mp4?m=DASHPl…
That wouldnt fall under** far **left, would it? Duh.
I would argue that universal healthcare, trans rights and taxing billionaires are not far left, but Im not American.
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
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.
The kids for bullying her for her tan
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 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)
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.
They love overreacting to small problems.
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.
Ya, AI is not the story here.
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.
I am Canadian, how can I help? Because this shit is coming to Canada, too.
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 didn’t know Reddit admins were also school admins
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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?
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
Do you want to badly fuck up a society? Because that is how you badly fuck up a society.
Gotta indoctrinate them into the surveillance state early. Gotta break them before they learn to resist.
put the phone down
What a shithole country.
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.
The US will do anything and everything except try proper gun control
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.
I mean, where’s the towering brutalist architecture?
I think China is doing a good job at that.
Mom, can we have Equilibrium at home?
“ICE reached out to both Mr. Bale and Mr. Bean, but regrettably, neither were interested in the job.”
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.
“It made me feel like, is this the America we live in?”
Some people are really fucking ignorant.
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).
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.
It’s ok to make jokes.
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.
Snapchat’s automated detection software picked up the comment, the company alerted the FBI, and the girl was arrested on school grounds within hours.
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.
In a country weary of school shootings, several states have taken a harder line on threats to schools. Among them is Tennessee, which passed a 2023 zero-tolerance law requiring any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement.
The 13-year-old girl arrested in August 2023 had been texting with friends on a chat function tied to her school email at Fairview Middle School, which uses Gaggle to monitor students’ accounts.
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.
Yeah especially around middle school, the “darker” the “joke” the more funny it was
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.
Another school shooting avoided! Just kidding, we just tortured a child for fun.
Which kinda seems like a villain origin story to me.
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.
The cruelty is the point.
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.
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.
The police are not effective at dealing with school shootings.
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.
Man, if only there was a good way to stop school shooting
Alas, one can only dream
the policy is to stop school shootings
You should try Europe once. It’s more fun than your 3rd world country.
Authorities be like “aww shoot, not again.”
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.”
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.
There is something fundamentally fucked up in a country that arrests and puts in jail a 13 years old kid over a bad joke.
cdf12345@lemmy.zip 8 months 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.
prex@aussie.zone 8 months ago
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"
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 8 months ago
They want more slave labor. The greater good is enriching themselves.