Schools Utilize Artificial Intelligence for Monitoring Students

• Artificial intelligence in schools can produce serious consequences.
• Monitoring technologies analyze students' online activities.
• Some students face serious consequences for inappropriate comments.

In American schools, increasingly more systems are being utilized to monitor students' online activities. Technologies such as Gaggle and Lightspeed Alert analyze alerts, aiming to identify signs of self-harm or violence. They can quickly alert school administrators and law enforcement.

However, the results of using these systems can lead to instances where students report serious consequences for non-serious comments. For example, a 13-year-old girl from Tennessee was suspended after making a harmless joke in class, which led to her questioning and nighttime detention in a juvenile facility.

The girl's parents filed a lawsuit against the school system, claiming that their daughter was not informed of the impending day, and she did not know why her parents could not talk to her. Technology companies that develop these programs often do not disclose data on the effectiveness of their systems, including the number of serious reports, which raises additional questions about their reliability.

Monitoring systems, according to educators, can save lives, but critics assert that they lead to criminalization of children over non-obscene words. In Tennessee and other states, laws require immediate reporting to law enforcement of any threat of mass violence.

As a result, in some instances, students can receive serious penalties for comments that were not threatening in context. For example, in one instance, a program flagged "not appropriate" images, which turned out to be harmless triangles, causing unnecessary panic among students.

Overall, monitoring technologies in schools continue to raise concerns about their impact on students' lives and mental health.

Tags: Technology/AI