Florida Department of Education passes law regulating AI

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The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a hot-button issue regarding education within the past few years, going mainly unregulated within school districts. However, on Wednesday, Sept. 16, the Florida Department of Education approved rule 6A-1.0957, the Internet Safety Policy, regulating the usage of AI within Florida public schools.

“The purpose of this rule is to set forth requirements for internet safety policies that must be adopted by school districts and charter school governing boards,” the rule said. “These policies must protect students, parents, and instructional personnel from unlawful, deceptive, unsafe, or unauthorized uses of artificial intelligence systems, services, applications, and tools used in connection with educational programs and operations in Florida public schools.”

The Internet Safety Act will go into effect in every Florida district by July 1 of 2027. This act’s policies state that Florida students’ parents must be notified when the use of AI tools are approved for instructional use and how the tool will be used. AI tools must be reviewed for accuracy and appropriateness, and the tools will not replace the education that students receive from teachers and instructors. Parents of students are also allowed to opt out of the use of any and all AI tools that are used to create instructions and grades, as well as any AI that the student might be told to use for their own work.

Students are divided on the use of AI within the classroom, with some being vehemently against the idea of it being used to teach, grade, and complete assignments, and some being for it, enjoying the easy accessibility and information it has to offer.

“I am in complete non-support for it,” senior Em Martinez said. “If teachers aren’t putting the work into using their own time and effort to create work for students, why should the students take their time out of their day to do work for them that wasn’t even made by man? I think it impacts their intelligence, because we start relying on robots to do our work for us—to think for us. I mean, there are people saying, ‘Guys, I think I got ChatGPT in my brain!’”

Other anti-AI students believe that the bill should’ve restricted the use of generative tools even further, and that the approval of AI in schools was “irresponsible, and [that] it’s going to set up our society for more systematic failures,” sophomore Kennedy Perri said.

Students believe that the bill was faulty and created with the wrong ideas in mind. Rather than the need to opt out of AI in school settings, Perri believes that opting into AI should be necessary.

“Regarding the bill that was being passed, I feel like, you know, it should’ve been a bit of a vice-versa situation where instead of it being a default to where we’re supposed to be using AI for everything—especially school and education when our brains are forming—we should be able to opt into the use of AI,” Perri said.

While some students are deeply against artificial intelligence in schools for both moral and educational reasons, others enjoy being able to use AI to lighten their workloads. Some students even use AI to help with their studies and their learning.

“I use AI to see, like, if I’m stuck on something, I use it to see how they figured it out and I learn from it,” freshman Daisy Wilder said. “I think it’s [AI use in classrooms] a great thing because it can help teachers just get their work done fast and help if they’re stuck on something. It can also, like, help students doing in-class assignments if they just learned something new, they can just ask ChatGPT how to figure it out.”