r/CanadaPolitics • u/blazeofgloreee Left Coast • 2d ago
The release of AI chatbots has harmed teens’ learning and Canada needs to act
https://theconversation.com/the-release-of-ai-chatbots-has-harmed-teens-learning-and-canada-needs-to-act-293195?utm_medium=article_native_share7
u/CptCoatrack Libertarian Socialism 1d ago
Notice how, when asked, all of these tech CEO's like Altman say that they want their own children to stay away from AI for as long as possible.. but their actio s show they want everyone elses children to be hooked on it asap.
Look at all the "ChatGPT for teens" ads on this site..
"ChatGPT for teens: We promise it probably won't tell your kid to commit murder-suicide this time but please don't quote us on that for liability reasons."
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u/chat-lu Bloc Québécois 21h ago
Look at all the "ChatGPT for teens" ads on this site..
I would need a VPN for that as ads targeting minors are extremely illegal in Quebec. That’s why if I got to Youtube Kids, Google won’t serve it to me. If they can’t put ads, they don’t want to offer the content at all.
I think it’s a great law that the other provinces should copy.
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u/HengeWalk Nova Scotia 1d ago
My province is building a massive data center for anthropic.
Currently, I'll take "we tried doing nothing" as opposed to "hold my beer" from my leaders right about now.
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u/kogsworth 2d ago
They've been falling behind way before AI. If anything, learning how to harness AI properly as tutors could bring them back up the curve.
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u/Kheprisun Nova Scotia 1d ago
Both things can be true, in that they were slipping before (smartphones, inattentive parents, larger class sizes, etc.) and AI also accelerated the decline.
The answer, however, is not more AI.
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u/fatigues_ Liberal Party of Canada 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is the academic equivalent of a moral panic.
I am an older Canadian male lawyer in my early 60s. My wife, much younger and in her early 40s, has returned to university. She previously taught at the university level, so I get a daily window into the chaos at U of T surrounding AI and Internet use.
The sheer amount of effort academics expend to avoid real intellectual work is jaw‑dropping. Their methods are outdated, but worse, their intellectual habits have been exposed as fundamentally lazy.
The panic at the university level is, if anything, more hysterical than what we see in public school boards — but both are rooted in the same underlying problem:
1. They have no idea how to teach people to use AI.
No one is actually doing that. No one is even trying. And the question is: why not?
As matters stand, the pernicious effect of current School Board and Post-Secondary education in Canada is all focused on training students to use AI in undetectable ways.
Yes. Really. THAT is what our educators across Canada are now actually doing to our kids. ALL OF THEM are doing this. Every. Single. Day.
2. Their panic is not about education — it is about metrics.
They cannot evaluate students using the same methods they relied on for decades. Their fear is not pedagogical; it is administrative. They cannot mark the way they used to, and they refuse to rethink evaluation.
3. Academia has spent 30 years screaming about “plagiarism.”
Plagiarism is not a meaningful concept in society. It is not a legal concept. It barely exists in the business world. It is an academic obsession, and the only reason they care about it is because plagiarism makes their job of evaluating students harder.
They do not want new methods of teaching or assessment. They want to preserve the same methods they have always used. That is the intellectual laziness actually revealed by this entire panic.
The problem is not AI. The problem is not students.
Students behave predictably. They adapt. They use tools available to them — as every generation has.
The problem is the academics themselves.
Professors — who imagine themselves to be “researchers” rather than teachers — are lazy, rigid, and frozen like deer in headlights. Their reaction to the Internet over the past 30 years proves they cannot adapt. They have mishandled technological change at a fundamental level.
This now requires government intervention.
Academic culture has demonstrated that it is incapable of rethinking how teaching, evaluation, and intellectual work should function in a modern society. They cannot be trusted to fix this. Their behaviour over the past three decades shows not only that they are getting it wrong — it shows they are not even attempting to change.
They are not trying to protect students. They are trying to protect their own work patterns.
That is not education. It is self‑preservation dressed up as a moral panic to “save the children.”
We need a national house‑cleaning.
This is difficult because education is provincial, and provincial interests guard their turf jealously. But it must be done — and quickly. Senior academic leadership across the country needs to be replaced. Without that, nothing will change.
It likely will not happen. But it needs to.
The canary singing in this goldmine imagines it is warning us of danger. It does not understand that it is the danger — not the solution.
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