Student Yolani Joseph on AI normalization without accountability

Hello, good afternoon.

My name is Yolani Joseph.

I'm 16 years old, a sophomore from Brooklyn, New York, and an organizer with the NYCLU's Teen Activist Project.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.

When people talk about artificial intelligence in schools, I often hear one assumption.

That students either fully support it or don't care about its impact.

But many of us do care because we're the ones experiencing these changes in real time.

My concern is how quickly AI is being normalized in schools without enough accountability, transparency, or guidance on how it should support student learning.

Recently, my friend and I were reviewing a reproductive health slideshow for class and came across a sentence full of scrambled words, errors, and unclear information.

Our impression was that the teacher created the classroom content with Notebook LM, an AI tool, and we were shocked.

Even though we were eventually able to make sense of it, we shouldn't have had to spend time guessing what the curriculum was trying to say.

Students deserve educational materials that are clear, accurate, and understandable, especially when learning about subjects as important and personal as our own health.

And that experience reflects a larger issue.

So much that it's something that I've also heard echoed when talking to my peers about AI in education.

I've had one of my peers recently tell me, quote, although AI is helpful in some ways, students often use it to cheat instead of studying.

And when exams come around, students can feel lost because they don't have that sense of security that they did before.

And another student, my friend, shared with me that, quote, her school is shutting down and they're opening up a school for AI-focused in its place.

I love my school because everyone was able to get the attention they needed, and taking that away feels like a step in the wrong direction.

Even though that plan for an AI school was paused for now, what stood out to me wasn't the opposition to technology.

It was a pattern.

AI is being normalized faster than students are being taught how to engage with it responsibly.

AI literacy has to mean something other than filling classrooms with AI products.

It has to mean understanding how and when to question these products and protect against the threat that they pose to teaching and learning.

Students are asking for accountability, clear standards that protect student learning, and standards that ensure human judgment stays at the center of education.

Thank you.

Thank you, Yolani.