A teacher at the front, children half-listening, and pencils rolling off desks are all familiar signs of controlled chaos when you walk into a traditional elementary school on any Tuesday morning. In contrast, Alpha School appears more like a peaceful co-working area for kids. Students work through AI-driven modules in four subjects—math, science, language, and social studies—for thirty minutes each while seated in rows of laptops with headsets on. The academic part of the day ends at 11 a.m. CategoryDetailsSchool NameAlpha SchoolFounded2014, Austin, TexasFounder & CEOMacKenzie Price, Stanford-educated entrepreneurTuition Range$500/year (Brownsville, TX) to $65,000/year (New York, NY)Academic ModelAI-powered tablets &…
Author: Janine Heller
A company experiences a certain kind of tension when its past and future are rapidly diverging. That’s about where Meta is at the moment, launching a brand-new AI model on the one hand while a California jury recently revealed to the world that Instagram was created with children in mind. In a case centered on the experiences of a 20-year-old woman known in court records as KGM, or Kaley, the decision was rendered recently. Her story—severe body dysmorphia, depression, and suicidal thoughts, all purportedly exacerbated by obsessive Instagram use during her early years—was detailed enough to be convincing and intimate…
In one courtroom in Riyadh, an algorithm sorts, flags, and sketches out a file’s procedural roadmap before a judge even reads it. Not a robe. No folder-fumbling clerk. It’s just a machine that silently completed tasks that used to take days in just a few minutes. The extent to which this has already progressed is still unknown to the majority of people in the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia has been working toward this goal for years, carefully integrating AI into its legal system in a way that usually goes unnoticed until all of a sudden it does. More than 150 digital…
The second Uber sexual assault bellwether trial, which is currently taking place in a federal courthouse in Charlotte, has a moment that the jury is unlikely to forget anytime soon. The plaintiff, who was 23 years old when the incident occurred, came out from behind the witness box to show what her Uber driver had done to her. Her upper inner thigh in a handful. He asked if he could keep her leg. After returning home and failing to wake her boyfriend, she looked at the security cameras to make sure the driver had left before attempting to wash his…
A certain type of grief is associated with the quiet, legal aftermath rather than the initial shock. Press releases are how it gets there. It is concealed in expressions such as “settlement in principle.” It appears in the language of attorneys general rather than the language of families who are still wondering why six men left in the middle of the night to work on a bridge and never returned. Two years after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River in the early morning darkness, Maryland is currently in that situation. It’s difficult not to feel as…
Like most panics in education, it began quietly. Essays that were overly polished were observed by a teacher in New York. A computer science professor observed junior-year students staring at blank screens, unable to start the assignments they had been working toward for two years. No alarm bell was rung. They have recently begun to prohibit certain things. By the end of May 2023, some of the biggest school districts in the US had blocked ChatGPT along with YouTube and Roblox. Los Angeles Unified and New York City Public Schools took the lead in removing the chatbot from school Wi-Fi…
Late at night, a certain kind of silence descends upon a law library; it’s the kind that feels earned, almost sacred. Annotated codes, floor-to-ceiling treatises, and rows of bound reporters. With a highlighter in hand, a young associate bent over a desk, searching through footnotes for a citation. That picture was the epitome of legal preparation for many years. In some places, it still occurs. However, something has moved beneath it, similar to how a floor moves before anyone notices a crack in the foundation. CategoryDetailTopicArtificial Intelligence in Law, Judiciary & Legal AcademiaCore DomainsLegal Research, Contract Analysis, Document Automation, Court…
Observing a well-crafted set of guidelines being subtly ignored is almost unsettling. UNESCO spent years developing a policy architecture for artificial intelligence in education, including guidelines for governments, ethical standards for institutions, and competency frameworks for educators. A large portion of this architecture was published between 2021 and 2024. Most of the time, the world continued on without much recognition. The results of UNESCO’s own survey provide a clear picture. Nine out of ten of the 400 respondents, who were selected from UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks in 90 countries, said they frequently used AI tools in their professional work.…
Every few years, a policy decision in Washington is made quietly enough that most people are unaware of it until businesses begin contacting their attorneys. When Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the formation of the AI Litigation Task Force in an internal memo to DOJ staff on January 9, 2026, that moment might have come. No press conference. No announcement during prime time. It’s just a memo that’s making the rounds in federal hallways, but it represents a big change in the way this nation plans to handle artificial intelligence. Key InformationDetailsInitiative NameDOJ AI Litigation Task ForceAnnounced ByAttorney General Pam…
This year, if you stroll through a public elementary school in Texas, you’ll notice a subtle change. Workbooks that start with Genesis are being opened by kindergarteners. Students in the third grade are learning that Jesus literally rose from the dead and worked miracles. Fifth graders are reading about the Last Supper from Matthew’s Gospel. This is not a Sunday school elective that is incorporated into an after-school program. Bluebonnet Learning is the official state-authored reading curriculum. CategoryDetailsCurriculum NameBluebonnet Learning (Reading & Language Arts, K–5)Developed ByTexas Education Agency (TEA)Approval Vote8–6, Texas State Board of Education (2024)Grade Levels AffectedKindergarten through 5th Grade…