1. United States
2. Va.
3. Letter

I urge you not to support Senator Schiff's "Literacy in Future Technologies (LIFT) Artificial Intelligence Act". I am an educator, so I absolutely implore you to take me seriously on this. Generative AI is bad for students. Many studies have shown this. It damages brain functions and makes people quantifiably worse at critical thinking. This is particularly dangerous for students, whose brains are still developing. We cannot encourage them to engage in cognitive off-loading when they don't yet have the skills and practice of cognitive on-loading. The dominance of generative AI is also not inevitable. We do not, in fact, need to prepare students to allow their lives to be consumed by it. We need to be fighting against it. Apart from how badly it damages a person's ability to reason, it is inherently unethical (built on the stolen labor of creative and academic professionals), an ecological disaster (server farms are guzzling water and creating "heat islands", which we do not need in our already fragile climate), and psychologicall dangerous (we are hearing more and more stories from people who have been led into psychosis because these plagiarism machines reinforce conspiracy theories and delusions). Everyone pushing for more AI in every aspect of our lives has a financial stake in doing so. They know their business is inherently unstable, and so they are trying to addict the nation to something it does not need and is in fact bad for humanity. This bubble deserves to pop, and the sooner the better. Please, please, please work against these things rather than for them. Do not put your weight behind this bill.