Dinowitz confronts DOE on OpenGen AI tool piloted in District 28
Dinowitz reads from Local Law 35 about an OpenGen AI teaching assistant tool that generates responses to student prompts, contradicting testimony that no student-facing AI is deployed. Strickland confirms it is piloted in District 28 with parental consent. Dinowitz calls students 'guinea pigs' and demands evidence of efficacy.
I appreciate that.
Good afternoon, Council.
My name is Dr.
Alan Chang.
I'm the supervising superintendent for high schools in District 79.
Where I want to start is,
As both Council Chairs Dinowitz and De La Rosa have said, we deeply, deeply are committed to our public schools as places of learning.
And we know that oftentimes in public discourse, uses of AI tools, particularly unstructured large language models like Claude and ChatGPT, have a way of shortcutting and short-circuiting that thinking.
And by design, we have limited and prohibited that.
Your question is around the research that is behind this work.
Well, my question is that you are approving these tools, and I do want to read one to you from Local Law 35.
Okay.
What it says and how it conflicts with the testimony that was just given.
And the question is why we're approving tools when there doesn't seem to be any empirical evidence to demonstrate their efficacy in student learning.
So this is OpenGen AI and Teaching Assistant Tool.
And it says the tool purpose
The tool is your...
used to generate responses to prompts entered by a student or a teacher.
Requesting the generative value tool to compose text response to a text input.
So I just wanted to read that to you because that was...
That is correct.
That Gen AI tool has been deployed to a very limited number of schools, and any student that interacts with that tool has gotten parental consent.
Mostly in District 28 is where that's been deployed.
I'm sorry, we have to, I'm sorry.
For everyone in the audience, we have to listen, and if you have something to say, you can, what do we do, what's this little?
This means yes, and this means no.
But the verbal assents or dissents cannot continue, okay?
So in just one school district you're using this tool, District 28?
That's the one where it's been piloted and is most heavily used by a small number of teachers and a small number of students.
And with what guardrails or assurances in place, this isn't...
Part of cognitive offloading that so many of us are concerned about.
I'll make some general statements around that.
It's used with...