Representing parents across the nation, she expressed support for the responsible use of artificial intelligence as a tool to enhance educational outcomes, while also emphasizing parents’ serious concerns about rushed implementation without appropriate safeguards and guardrails in place.
Well, yes, that's...um...correct.
Meanwhile, Politico's Andrew Atterbury covered Ron DeSantis's very crabby opposition to AI.
“Let’s not try to act like some type of fake videos or fake songs are going to deliver us to some kind of utopia,” the governor said Dec. 18.
He notably has taken aim at data centers sprouting up across the country by attempting to slow their growth in Florida, siding with local communities opposing the massive developments. And DeSantis frequently raises fears of how AI could ultimately upend the economy by displacing countless workers. The Republican rails against what he calls the “mindless slop” AI creates and warns deepfakes and manipulation could pose “a potential existential crisis for self-government.”
“The idea of this transhumanist strain, that somehow this is going to supplant humans and this other stuff, we have to reject that with every fiber of our being,” DeSantis said Dec. 15 during an AI event in Jupiter. “We as individual human beings are the ones that were endowed by God with certain inalienable rights. That's what our country was founded upon — they did not endow machines or these computers for this.”
Okay, a little christiniast nationalismy for me, but basically, I think he's right.
And here's NPR, running the Ai resistance banner up the flagpole that is Keri Rodrigues, the leader of the astroturfed National Parents Union. She found her son interacting with the chatbot on his Bible app. He was asking deep moral questions about sin and stuff. Author Rhitu Chatterjee sets her irony ignorer on stun and writes
That's the kind of conversation that she had hoped her son would have with her and not a computer. "Not everything in life is black and white," she says. "There are grays. And it's my job as his mom to help him navigate that and walk through it, right?"
She's not wrong (she's just a bad spokesperson for moral complexity and nuance).
It feels a little reminiscent of the Common Core days, when the opposition include a coalition of people who were against the Core because they wanted to defend public schools and those who were against the Core because they considered it the ultimate example of everything Terrible and Wrong about public schools.
And just to ramp up that sense of deja vu, here comes the AFT to team up with our AI overlords to spend $23 million on teaching teachers to use AI. Or maybe you caught AFT chief Randi Weingarten's Christmas posts on the twitter and ye blue skye-- some lovely arts from the plagiarism and lies machine. Sigh. AFT has displayed some caution about AI in classrooms, and Weingarten has been crystal clear about her opposition to Trump's order to keep states from passing any sort of AI rules.
Lots of smart folks are predicting (even more) AI backlash in 2026, so maybe the right wing outrage crowd is simply angling to get in front of what they believe will be the next big fifteen-minute wave.
Whatever the case, these folks who are so reliably on the wrong side of so many education issues are, on this issue, are better on AI, or at least are saying some of the right words. Can they keep it up even as Trump continues to argue for unfettered, unregulated AI, including a federal attempt to forbid states to exercise their rights to regulate a business. Because if Dear Leader can do anything, it's sense where a whole lot of money is about to be thrown around so that he can insert himself into the transaction. States' rights? Who cares. 2026 could be an interesting year.
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