Heading into the school year that starts in four days, Mayor Mamdani’s Department of Education and Chancellor Kamar Samuels have announced a generative AI ban for students through 8th grade, limited screen time for younger students, and a slate of approved uses for AI tools for high schoolers that include literacy and career preparation but not the fundamentals of learning. This one-year moratorium isn’t much of a policy, more of a stall.

Samuels came up with this after a series of starts and stops and delays earlier in the year on the use of AI in the schools. But the confusion is not entirely his fault, as AI is spreading rapidly. While clearly we don’t want Anthropic’s Claude writing 5th grade compositions and OpenAI’s ChatGPT solving math homework problem sets, it seems OK to use a spell-checker on an essay that a student wrote herself.

It’s impossible to make a decision of this sort that........

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