New York City
NYC Teachers Flagging AI Homework While Decorating Classrooms With AI Posters
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
New York City public school students who spent the better part of last year demanding that artificial intelligence be kept out of classrooms are now reporting that the technology has, in fact, remained in classrooms, moved to the teacher's desk, and printed itself onto laminated motivational posters.
The students are not pleased.
"We were told AI was a form of cheating," said Marcus Delgado, a junior at a Brooklyn high school who asked that his school not be named, presumably because he still has to pass it. "Then I walk in and the quiz on the American Revolution has four answers and one of them is 'All of the above,' and the other three are just variations of 'conflict led to independence.' That was written by a robot. I have read enough of these to know."
The grievance has a specific shape. Schools across the city adopted AI detection tools earlier this year after educators raised concerns about students submitting machine-generated essays. The software flags suspicious writing patterns and generates a percentage score that teachers can include when reporting academic dishonesty. Students say the tools are inaccurate, stressful, and applied exclusively to people who are being graded, rather than to people doing the grading.
At a meeting of the student council at one Manhattan middle school, a presentation about responsible technology use was projected onto a wall. The slideshow contained eight slides. Each slide had a stock illustration of a human brain with glowing blue circuits running through it. The font was Canva's default AI-suggested pairing. A sixth finger appeared on a hand in slide three. Nobody mentioned it.
"I flagged it," said one eighth grader, who estimated she has had three essays returned with AI warnings after writing all of them herself, long-hand, in a notebook, and then typed them up. "My teacher said I was being disrespectful. The hand had six fingers."
New York City Department of Education spokesperson Brianna Cole said in a statement that the district "remains committed to supporting educators in building future-ready classrooms that center student integrity, critical thinking, and the responsible integration of emerging tools," which is a sentence that could only have been written by a human because no AI would have let it go out like that.
Teachers unions have not formally addressed the poster situation. A spokesperson for the United Federation of Teachers said the union supports professional development opportunities that allow educators to evaluate all available resources, which means the posters are staying up.
Several students said the part that bothers them most is not the AI itself but the asymmetry. They were asked to sign academic honesty pledges. They were warned about consequences. One student said his teacher opened the year with a ten-minute speech about intellectual ownership and the importance of original thought, delivered from notes the student later found word-for-word on a Reddit thread titled "first day of school speech ideas."
"I'm not even mad about the AI," he said. "I'm mad that she made us clap at the end."
The Department of Education did not respond to a follow-up question about whether AI detection tools can be run on PowerPoint files. They can.
The story we are making fun of: https://gothamist.com/news/ai-wary-nyc-students-say-the-tech-is-still-sneaking-into-classrooms