Technology

There is something fundamentally fucked up in a country that arrests and puts in jail a 13 years old kid over a bad joke.

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 experts 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.

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.

The US will do anything and everything except try proper gun control

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.

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.”

Students who think they are chatting privately among friends often do not realize they are under constant surveillance

This is the problem

Lots of wannabe authoritarians out there in educationland.

All those decades that the schools just -couldn't afford- more (well-educated) teachers and smaller class sizes. Lots of low-end look-good.

And then along came tech, and lo-and-behold, IT was going to be the savior. Let's buy into that! We may not be able to teach them to read, write or think, but they can learn to kneel!

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.

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 sunglasses worn after dark and slicked back hair? If they're going to ask me for 'ze papers' all the time, the least they can do is look cool doing it, godamnit. 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.

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!

Another school shooting avoided! Just kidding, we just tortured a child for fun.

What is sad is that an environment like this ruins someone’s mental health and ironically increasing the overall risk of violence.

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.

I can't say for certain because I wasn't given one but I can't imagine me and my friends would have been willing to communicate with each other on devices provided by our school. Even in the early 00s it would have been filled with spyware.

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.

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 do 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 the 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 in 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 that populist dogma is welcoming with open arms of ignorance just like those that said the digital world was a meaningless novelty 30 years 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.

“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.

What a great way to prepare students for our AI enabled social media and digital surveillance society. Take note kids, trust no one!

More free child labor in jails.

WTF America?

I didn’t know Reddit admins were also school admins

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.

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.

Thought control

The world is turning into one giant shitty customer service experience.

LOL the land of the free.

“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.