The AI sends a 13 -year -old college student to prison for a “joke”, a disturbing authoritarian drift

The incident begins online while comrades tease the teenager on her tanned complexion by calling her “Mexican”although it is not. A friend then asked her for her plans for Thursday, to which the middle school meets: “We kill all mexicos”. Except that this “joke” triggered the school surveillance AI. An average joke, certainly, but which does not justify the continuation of events.

AI at the service of authoritarian surveillance

The morning is not even over yet that the middle school of Fairview Middle School is arrested, questioned with a complete body excavation and spends the night in cell. It was not until the next day that his parents have the opportunity to speak to him according to the complaint they have filed against the establishment.

The mother of the middle school, Leslie Mathis, declares: “It makes me ask me if that is America in which we live and it is this stupid technology that reviews and collects words at random without looking at the context”.

Thousands of school districts in the United States use AI software to monitor students’ online activity. We are talking about applications like Gaggle and Lightspeed Alert which scrutinize digital conversations and alert school officials and police.

Jeff Patterson, CEO of Gaggle, however criticizes the use made by the school. The software is designed to detect alarm signals and prevent an escalation. “I would have liked it to be treated as an educational moment, not police” he said.

Tennessee adopted a law in 2023 which imposed zero tolerance for any threat of mass violence against a school. What explains this excess of zeal is the arrest of the 13 -year -old schoolgirl, especially when we know that the country is regularly targeted by Mass shoots.

The teenager received eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological assessment and 20 days in an alternative school. His mother confides: “She thought I hated her. It haunts this kind of thing for you.”

Students often ignore that they are constantly monitored. Shahar Pasch, a lawyer specializing in education in Florida, represents a teenager arrested after a joke on the school shootings posted on Snapchat. The AI -based software captured the comment and then alerted the FBI. The girl was arrested at school in a few hours.

The effectiveness of the AI remains questionable, since in the district of Lawrence in Kansas, Gaggle generated more than 1,200 alerts in ten months, but only two thirds were baseless. According to theAssociated Presswe are talking about more than 200 false alerts that come from students’ homework.

Many disturbing failures due to AI

For example, students in a photography course have been summoned to the director Car Gaggle detected nudity. The photos were automatically deleted from Google Drive, but the students proved with their backup that it was a mistake.

Another example: Natasha Torkzaban was reported by the software after helping a friend correct her cover letter for the university, where we found the word “Mental health”. The young woman is part of a group of students journalists and artists who filed a complaint against their school district last week by speaking of authoritarian surveillance.

In Florida, the Paul County district received nearly 500 gaggle alerts in four years, and 72 people have been hospitalized under the Baker Act, a law that allows authorities to impose psychiatric assessments.

In short, the authoritarian drift is scary, as Sam Boyd, lawyer at Southern Poverty Law Center explains: “A truly high number of children who undergo an involuntary psychiatric examination remember it as a traumatic experience, and not something that helps them with their mental health”.

Note that the incident we are talking about in the article took place two years ago, but the girl remains “horrified” to meet the school agents who arrested it. “It is as if we wanted children to be small soldiers, but they are not, they are just human beings”explains Leslie Mathis.