Beware, AI Cameras in the Classroom Filming Your Children and Gathering Personal Data

Parents in Washington state got wind of AI ‘experiment’ at their children’s pre-school and were able to stop it, but how many other similar programs are being run without parents’ knowledge?

There’s a new and dire threat to privacy that parents of school children need to be aware of and be prepared to fight against.

AI surveillance in the classroom.

Frank Landymore of Futurism.com reports, in a May 18 article, on a sinister plan hatched by the University of Washington to film pre-school children during class time. If this is going on in Washington, you have to believe it’s going on, at least in the planning stages if not already happening, across the 50 states.

The article reports that a planned University of Washington study would’ve had preschool teachers wear cameras to “record first-person footage of everything in the classroom,” including the children they were instructing, and use that footage to train AI models.

Remember, those behind the global technocracy movement believe the only value a human being will hold in the new society they are trying to create, is the data sets they produce. This was stated in the wide open a few years ago by World Economic Forum adviser Yuval Noah Harari. Without your personal data to be stolen, manipulated, and sold for profit, you are nothing to them but a useless eater.

Part of the plan is to create a “digital twin” of every person on earth as an anchor to the new digital control grid.

So why wouldn’t the Epstein class of entitled billionaire elites who harbor perverted, twisted views of children, want a daily video record of everything your child does in school? Every word uttered. Every facial expression. Every action and reaction. Year over year for comparison’s sake. Then they can use this data to create algorithms that predict everything your child will grow up to become before he or she is 10 or 12 years old?

Harari, an Israeli historian and chief adviser to the WEF, has said that if he had access to artificial intelligence when he was younger, he believes he would have discovered he was a homosexual at age 11 or 12 instead of at 17. In fact, a Newsweek article from September 8, 2017, made the case that AI can predict “with startling accuracy” whether a person is gay or straight.

But this particular story, in the case of Washington State, has a positive outcome. It exemplifies the kind of parental awareness and bold activism that is needed to shut down the illegitimate use of AI technology in the classroom.

Below is an excerpt from the Futurism article:

If a parent was uncomfortable with all that, they had to manually opt-out — meaning that unless the researchers were given a formal no, a parent’s child would’ve been automatically opted into the experiment.

“With your permission, your child’s lead teacher may wear a small teacher-worn camera that captures the teacher’s approximate first-person perspective, and/or we may place a fixed video camera in the classroom,” reads a document given to parents and obtained by 404 Media in a new investigative piece. “These videos simply capture the normal interactions between teachers and children during regular classroom activities.”

The parents did a little more than opt out, however. They revolted, and the backlash was so heated that the University of Washington called off the experiment entirely, according to 404.

The documents given to parents sometimes used nebulous language and left key questions open-ended. They stated that the footage would’ve been used to “develop and evaluate AI models for assessing classroom interaction quality,” and that the “video data may be processed using cloud-based AI services.” But they didn’t specify what AI models or what AI companies would be involved.

Thorny questions abounded. What about the parent of a child who didn’t give consent? Would only they be blurred out in the footage? How would that realistically work? The documents only said the researchers would censor faces and names “whenever possible,” but that meant your child was still being filmed.

These looming uncertainties rattled parents.

“I am troubled by the idea of using my child’s likeness in unknown AI tools and how this could be abused,” one parent who chose to remain anonymous told 404.

“I was particularly concerned about families’ ability to give informed consent,” she added. “As a native English speaker, the vague language in the handout left me with a slew of questions. Many families in our school are migrants and non-native English speakers, but forms were not provided in any of their native languages.”

Experts in education were also raising eyebrows at the document’s language.

“Who may the data may be shared with? How long will it be maintained? Who is funding the research? Those are questions that I would want answers to, and the answers could exist,” Faith Boninger, co-director of the National Education Policy Center, told 404.

The University of Washington said it was putting the research on ice after parent backlash.

“Given the early responses from parents, we have terminated the study and are no longer seeking participation at any site,” a spokesperson told 404, noting that it’s “not unusual to terminate a study in the early stages as we receive feedback from community partners.”

The cancelled study marks the latest evolutionary stage of AI’s inroads into education. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft are pouring millions of dollars into teacher’s unions and providing training on how to use their AI tools. Universities are partnering with AI companies to give students free access to AI, in what essentially amounts to putting a rubber stamp on how students are already dependent on AI to write essays and complete assignments — or, in other words, cheating. Now, with that massive drive to inject AI into the classroom, there’s apparently a consequent demand to gather data to fuel the building of specialized models.

Its demise is also an example of how parents have been spearheading the mounting AI backlash. A planned AI-powered high school in New York was cancelled, for instance, after more moms and dads protested outside City Hall last month.

https://leohohmann.substack.com/p/beware-ai-cameras-in-the-classroom