Erin Mote

Now, here's the detail I'd want every school leader to notice.

Also at that UN meeting, according to EdWeek, was Erin Mote, who runs an organization called Innovate Edu.

She said she doesn't think blanket AI moratoriums are helpful.

Then she got very specific.

40% of the young people polled said they'd used AI for health advice, and two in five said they'd used it to talk through something emotional.

Those are self-reported numbers from a poll, and they cover young people in England rather than American students, so hold them loosely.

But they connect straight back to Erin Mote and her point about companions.

If a meaningful share of teenagers are already treating a chatbot as somewhere to take a worry, then a school that only talks about cheating has missed most of the conversation.

OK.

And of course, others with close ties to the ed tech world, the AI world like Ben Wallerstein at Whiteboard Advisors or Erin Mote herself have been making the case that basically we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I've been writing about this and getting some feedback.

Listen to, for example, Lindsay Dworkin, who is a senior vice president for public policy at the textbook giant H.M.H., She says a student asking a chat bot to write an essay for them and a teacher using an AI enabled tool to understand where students are struggling and what support they need may both be technically using AI, but they're doing fundamentally different things.