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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has unveiled a one-year ban on the use of student-facing generative AI across the city’s public schools through eighth grade, and restrictions on the use of the technology in high schools.
“The tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary. We do not see it that way,” said Mamdani in a statement.
The moratorium, announced Wednesday, is a reportedly first-of-its kind policy that will be implemented for the largest school district in the country. It bars teachers from using AI for most tasks in the classroom, and bans elementary and middle school students from using the technology for school work. This represents roughly 600,000 students.
High school students can only use AI in limited instances, and the school district is launching a pilot program for specific AI tools for high school students to use. There will also be twice-yearly AI literacy courses that instruct students about the biases, limits, and ethical concerns related to artificial intelligence.
“Companion” chatbots, or ones that are made to develop relationships with the user, are banned across all grades under the new policy.
The school district will spend the length of the moratorium evaluating the program and making determinations over its efficacy. Community groups and city council members recently called for a two-year moratorium on the technology within schools.
“We know the purpose of AI companies whether they are making sports betting models or an education tool: it is to produce a profit. Here in our New York City public schools, our purpose is our students,” Mamdani said in a press conference.
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The policy also sets screen time limits for younger students and recommends caps of less than an hour of screen time per day for elementary and middle school students, while students up until second grade won’t have access to individual screens at all.
Research has found that AI use is expanding rapidly across schools. The vast majority of high school and college students say they use AI to help with schoolwork, while a RAND Institute study found that more than 80 percent of students said teachers didn’t give them explicit instructions on how to use the technology.
Though AI use in schools has gone on relatively unabated by school districts and regulators, studies have found that a reliance on AI can have deleterious effects on students’ development. The Brookings Institute found in a recent study that its use in the classroom can “undermine children’s foundational development” and has already caused widespread damage across schools. Using AI as a shortcut for research, writing, and thinking does not allow children to develop key pathways for creativity, knowledge attainment, and critical thinking, the report warned.
New York officials said that the AI ban is the most comprehensive of its kind across the country, emphasizing the importance of such a policy for children’s development.
“We should never confuse a machine’s ability to produce an answer with a child’s ability to arrive at one. There is something sacred in the struggle to understand: the question asked twice, the page wrestled with, the mistake that becomes discovery, the teacher who sees possibility before a student sees it in themselves,” said New York state Sen. Robert Jackson (D) in a statement.
“That is where intellect is formed and independence begins,” Jackson went on. “In a democracy, we educate children not simply to know things, but to question, discern, imagine, and ultimately think for themselves.”
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