I have tabs open today, too

 Here are three to read:

• The way that we know what is going on with our local government, including our schools, is through local news, which is being infected by AI-generated slop. WGBH has good coverage on this "pink slime journalism."
  

• Josh Brake applies Frog and Toad's "Cookie Box Principle" to AI use. I would go a step further and go all the way: toss it entirely.

• The 74 takes up the new "AI Academy" [wince] that the American Federation of Teachers has announced they'll open. The title of the piece is "Will new AI Academy help teachers or just improve tech's bottom line?" The issue of course is even worse than framed by the question, which remarkably is actually framed in the article: 
  

  Writing in her Substack newsletter, ed-tech critic and AI skeptic Audrey Watters called AFT’s partnership with the tech companies “a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for.”
  Unions, she wrote, “should be one of the ways in which workers resist, rather than acquiesce to … the tech industry’s vision of the future.” By joining forces with big tech, she said, AFT is implicitly endorsing its products. “Teaching teachers how to use a suite of Microsoft tools does not help students as much as it helps Microsoft. Teaching teachers how to use a suite of Microsoft tools is not so much an ‘academy’ as a storefront.”
  Benjamin Riley, who has also written critically about generative AI in education, said observers should “100% worry” that the new partnerships represent a play for market share.
  “It’s very obvious from a product standpoint that they see education as one of, if not the primary, place to go with their product,” said Riley. “And the fact that AFT is willing to say, ‘Cool, let’s get some of that money and we’ll build a training center to help teachers use it,’ I can see why OpenAI would jump all over that.”
  But he questioned whether AI training is what AFT members really want. He suggested instead that the union should recommit to helping teachers more deeply understand how learning works. “They haven’t been opposed to it,” he said, noting that it has long run an “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column in the magazine it mails to members. “But in reality it just hasn’t been a priority. Improving pedagogy hasn’t really been, to my eyes, a union priority for a long time.”
  Riley, who in 2024 founded the think tank Cognitive Resonance to explore AI issues, said an organization like AFT should ideally be thinking about whether embracing AI will lead to better outcomes for children — or whether it could “potentially erode and devalue the work of human teaching” while opening up schools as customers for AI companies.