Digital indoctrination

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Like it or not, artificial intelligence is here to stay. I think it can be a useful tool in a lot of ways, but it has limits. It’s not perfect by any stretch.

I’ve asked Google AI for a list of people based on influence, only to see it list someone I’d never heard of near the top of the list. The person didn’t exist. When pressed, the AI admitted it was a hallucination and corrected the list, but that was because I knew enough to press.

This was likely a good-faith error because there was little for anyone to gain from the mistake, other than to potentially make someone look stupid. Still, AI is never going to be perfect. Garbage in, garbage out is always a factor, and so are the biases of those who develop AI systems.

Still, even the most well-meaning developers can make mistakes and introduce bias.

But what about when someone tries to intentionally “cook the books” on what an AI system will show someone? That should be troubling, right?

Enter the teachers’ unions.

The unions are collaborating with giant AI providers like Microsoft and Anthropic, who are footing the bill for nationwide programs to train teachers on using AI in the classroom. Sounds at first like a win-win: more resources for students, and access to the next generation of customers for Microsoft and other AI providers.

But the dirty secret, alleges a new research report from the watchdog group Defending Education, is that the unions want to alter the answers AI produces to ensure students are seeing not what is factually most accurate but instead what is politically correct.

The AFT is launching a nationwide training program for 10% of its teachers, paid for with $12.5 million from Microsoft and smaller grants from other AI companies. Defending Education claims that the plan includes embedding diversity, equity and inclusion ideology into the AI programs. The rationale is that this step must be taken because AI, having been designed by mostly white and Asian males, is biased.

Similarly, according to the Defending Education expose, the NEA mandates that local school boards integrate DEI into their AI programs.

The unions call the changes to AI “guardrails.” In truth, unions want to block students from seeing actual, un-doctored facts about anything. Their mission is to indoctrinate, not educate.

That misguided mission is largely to blame for the past decade of drastic learning loss in K-12 schools. Too much indoctrination, too little emphasis on the basics of math and reading. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that test scores on reading and math have steadily declined since 2013.

Look, in my mind, a “guardrail” for students would be things that keep students from seeing sexually explicit material, using the system to plan illegal activities, and things of that sort. You know, the kind of things no parent should have an issue with being kept from their kids in school-based systems.

But what we’re apparently seeing here is a sincere push to keep these systems from sharing any information beyond what the teachers’ unions specifically approve of. Want to see evidence against climate change? Tough. Want to see evidence that the founding of our nation wasn’t about racism and slavery? Too bad. How many people were really killed by communism? Nah.

On the other hand, if you want to explore whether you were born in the wrong body, I’m sure that not just will that be acceptable, but you’ll find out that you were.

See, the educational system is already problematic, and it’s problematic because it’s filled with people. Teaching is, by its very nature, a career that attracts people who are interested in changing the world. You’re not going to get rich doing it, so teachers are likely those who have some other motivating desire.

For many, it really is about helping young people learn. I know too many teachers to think otherwise.

But in a lot of other cases, it’s people who see their careers as teachers as little more than an opportunity to shape the next generation to be good little leftist foot soldiers. They push propaganda as fact, act as if they’re the only people students should look to for moral guidance, and don’t worry about what your parents approve of, because the teacher will keep a secret, no matter what that secret might be.

Unless, of course, that secret can be used against the parent, because that’s a different matter entirely.

Now, they want to manipulate the AI systems students will use so that it provides only the approved information, and the reason is very simple. If people look for information themselves and find a certain set of “facts,” they’re more likely to retain it than if a teacher they distrust or dislike tells them the same thing. Since many of the younger generation use AI as their go-to these days, and for good reason since Google sucks ass now, they’ll come to believe the information they were given was based on the facts and not some union’s ideology.

And let’s understand something here. The teachers’ unions don’t exist for the students. They never have. They never will. They exist to advance the union members’ agendas. More accurately, they exist to advance the most vocal and active members’ agendas.

After all, if they were really concerned about students, why do teachers’ unions do everything they can to protect teachers accused of sexual misconduct? They push gun control, but various forms of sexual misconduct happen significantly more often than so-called school shootings.

They push gun control because they’re leftist unions that think guns are the problem, but also that teachers are among those who get shot. If it were just students, I doubt they’d be quite as strident. Sexual misconduct, on the other hand, is committed by the unions’ members, and thus those members need protection.

So, problematic teachers get canned, but then shuffled off to another school to do it all over again, because the system in place will not let these teachers be blackballed.

When you realize this, you come to realize that the unions aren’t doing this because they’re concerned about students and their welfare. They’re concerned about their own agendas, which means using these AI “guardrails” as a means of indoctrination.

They want the garbage in to shape the garbage out, and to do that, they want to control what garbage goes in.

It’s just that simple, and it’s not even that difficult to do. Remember when AI couldn’t create an image of the Founding Fathers that featured white people, despite all the evidence proving they were, in fact, white? Remember the black Vikings?

That probably wasn’t even intentional, just someone letting their biases get in the way without thinking through the ramifications. This time, someone has thought of the ramifications, so I don’t see it being particularly difficult to make it happen.

And our kids are the ones who will pay.

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