Captive Audience
The LIFT AI Act has an earnest acronym and a simple pitch: OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft want to fund "AI literacy" in K-12 schools, because they care deeply about children and the future of learning. Not, presumably, because they are sitting atop a product with a likability problem and have just discovered that the most captive audience in America is a classroom of twelve-year-olds legally required to be there.
The bill defines AI literacy as "the age-appropriate knowledge and ability to use artificial intelligence effectively." The definition does not include understanding who owns it, who profits from it, what it costs environmentally, or why three companies that stand to gain billions in subscription revenue are suddenly so passionate about civics. That's a funny omission for a bill that also claims to teach students to "critically interpret outputs." One presumes this trio has taken upon itself to be the arbiter of what that constitutes.
The Slashdot comments, cut straight to it. The bill would "shoehorn in AI literacy" into K-12 curriculum, something the article notes young people and teachers alike already hate. One commenter rendered the entire initiative in eight words: "Learn to Code" becomes "Learn to Prompt." Another went: "Indoctrinate, indoctrinate, indoctrinate!" While not sophisticated critiques, they are accurate.
The most damning comment came from user MIPSPro, who noted that 21% of U.S. adults are illiterate and 56% read below a 6th-grade level, and asked, reasonably, why the solution to an illiteracy crisis is teaching children to outsource their writing to a machine. The companies endorsing this bill with OpenAI chief among them, have built products that are most useful to people who already read and write well. AI literacy curricula that skip over foundational literacy first is a bit like teaching driver's ed to children who can't yet see over the dashboard of the car.
The "equity" framing provides air-cover to some very well-compensated executives. The bill's supporters argue that affluent students are already using AI to tutor themselves and that federal funding will level the playing field. This is technically true in the same way that giving poor children a vending machine levels the playing field with rich children who have a kitchen and adults to cook them meals. The skill being transferred is dependency claiming it is identical to access.
The audacity of if this is admirable. Three of the most profitable companies in the history of capitalism have successfully attached themselves to a bipartisan education bill in a political climate where bipartisan anything is all but an impossibility. They've done this with loud public endorsement with their names attached, because nothing about this needs to be hidden. The pitch is legal, the bill is real, and if it passes, they will have used public school infrastructure and federal grant money to train a generation of users on their products before those users are old enough to drive.