going in the mail: letter to ASBO on AI

 I sent the following handwritten letter to the ASBO International Executive Director today.

March 22, 2026

Dear Mr. Rowan,

I had every intention of responding to your invitation to “join the AI user community” via email, but I have hope that my taking the time and care to write by hand may make you take notice. I realize there is a certain irony to that hope, given the topic.

As an ASBO member who is not a school business official, who works with school boards on school finance issues here in Massachusetts, I have found these past years of increasing hype on AI use in school finance not only deeply distressing, but entirely contrary to the values the profession of school business officials are defined by.

In both my ten years on my local school board and the now eleven years I have served in my current role, it is the unimpeachable integrity of the school business official on which our school board members depend to make their decisions on school finances. I note “integrity” is even the first principle to which the ASBO Board holds itself, a principle which speaks of the “ethical responsibility” with which they “uphold trust.”

How then is it that ASBO has and continues to advocate for members to use a system founded in intellectual property theft? One cannot use generative AI systems without using the uncited works of millions, work they did not assent to the use of.

Where is the integrity in using work that is inaccurate? Every week brings another several stories of generative AI results being no better than guessing (in fact, we might guess better). This has in some cases deadly results. While we can hope this is not the case in school finance, results that are incorrect can, as we both know, be catastrophic.

Notably for school finance, it was recently brought to my attention that Microsoft itself recommends against using its Copilot function in Excel for any task “with legal, regulatory, or compliance implications.” (You can find that on the Copilot support page.) I think you and I would agree that this is everything within a school business office.

I do not know how school boards can trust what they are given by their school finance officers given such warnings within the very systems on which they operate, unless the board members know they are not being used.

I could go on at length about the the many other ways this push violates the core principles of school finance (that vast waste of resources; the horrific impacts on our students, particularly those most vulnerable; its use to kill schoolgirls in Iran; and the list goes on), but the loss of integrity in school finance, the undermining of the trust that is core to the function of the school business official, is the item to which I most wish to draw your attention.

Please end this undermining of this crucial trust.

Thank you for your attention,

Tracy A. Novick

Being honest about generative AI

 The New York Times this weekend covers students 'fending off accusations of cheating' using AI  [gift link there]:

 In interviews, high school, college and graduate students described persistent anxiety about being accused of using A.I. on work they had completed themselves — and facing potentially devastating academic consequences.

In response, many students have imposed methods of self-surveillance that they say feel more like self-preservation. Some record their screens for hours at a time as they do their schoolwork. Others make a point of composing class papers using only word processors that track their keystrokes closely enough to produce a detailed edit history.

The next time Ms. Burrell had to submit an assignment for the class in which she had been accused of using A.I., she uploaded a 93-minute YouTube video documenting her writing process. It was annoying, she said, but necessary for her peace of mind.

Of course, as we learned in April, also in the Times: 

We have the integrity to note that what students are doing is cheating, but if teachers outsource their intellectual work--and yes, creating lesson plans and quizzes is intellectual work--then somehow that is not? 
Give me a break.

I appreciate the discussion that Marcus Luther at "The Broken Copier" had with his sophomores on this topic.

I spent part of last week with school business officials, which of course is another front in the "AI can do it!" battle. As I shared earlier this month, the latest testing has demonstrated no more than a 50% accuracy rate on finances.

The interview of Colin Fraser that Benjamin Riley shared on 'Cognitive Resonance' perhaps demonstrates why: 

...what you hope for is that the model is able to take a prompt such as “what is two plus two?” and find a symbolic representation which corresponds to two plus two, and then carry out the addition, two plus two equals four. The end. That’s what you hope happens.

But whether or not that is what’s happening is just a really complicated question. It’s very rare nowadays that a production model is not going to tell you two plus two is four, and in fact they can go pretty high in terms of addition.

Yet this actually breaks down once you get to a certain size of number. I've tested this out pretty extensively. Even the best production models start to break down around 40 digits of addition. And that’s a big number to add, for sure. But at the same time, if you know how to add, you can do it. Even a kid can add 40 digit numbers—it'll take them a long time, but they can do it.

If a model gives me an answer to a 40 digit sum and it’s wrong, that means it wasn’t adding.

When I tell you that I find the prospective of generative AI in school finance terrifying, I am not exaggerating.