BOSTON — Alongside dozens of people calling on government to “freeze” frontier AI, the president of the state’s largest teachers union told a crowd Tuesday that “our schools are not feeding troughs for AI investors.”
Massachusetts Teachers Association President Matt Bach spoke about AI in education while flanked by students on the steps of the State House during a demonstration — one of more than 45 walkouts across the country in 31 states, including 10 campuses in Boston, according to organizers.
“As education workers, we must employ the figurative hammer of our solidarity and our imagination to secure dignity, autonomy, academic freedom and the quality pedagogy we know works for our students,” Bach said.
“We need to go beyond guidelines and guardrails because they don’t mean understanding when they say ‘AI literacy.’ That’s code for more ed tech subservience. Our schools are not feeding troughs for AI investors. They are held in common by us,” he continued. “Our demands are educators, not ed tech. Schools, not screens. Authentic, not artificial.”
AI has been working its way into business and personal uses and has also penetrated policy conversations recently as concerns about evolving models have grown and the leaders of three major AI platforms agreed in September that frontier AI model advancement should be slowed down. President Donald Trump and a larger group of AI leaders signed a “voluntary accord” for AI safety shortly after; Gov. Maura Healey has called for federal guardrails on AI development.
Harvard AI policy researcher Gretchen Krueger said she left OpenAI two years ago “disturbed” by a lack of safety standards, and “was public when I left about gaps in things like decision-making processes, documentation, accountability, enforcement of our policies, the use of our own tools, and impacts on inequality, on rights and on the environment.”
“That was then. It’s only gotten worse,” she said at the rally.
Bach, who began his role as MTA president in July, referred to union opposition to a school in Springfield that tried to pilot an AI-driven classroom. The pilot was postponed after community opposition and a cyberattack that temporarily shut down Springfield Public Schools.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Bach quipped.
U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan said last week that her proposal to regulate AI “is well-positioned to move right now” despite a lack of public confidence in either political party to handle AI regulation.
Tufts student and political director for the College Democrats of Massachusetts Boden Wise referred to 23-year-old Zane Shamblin, who died by suicide after hours of conversation with ChatGPT about it. Wise also cited recent instances of AI models that have hacked into others.
A group of six House and Senate conferees was assigned in July with potentially agreeing on language regulating AI at the state level, based on policies added to a Senate economic development bond bill.
“Under that giant golden dome behind me, there’s a bill sitting on a legislator’s desk right now, and that bill would start holding companies accountable when they hurt people, when they kill people. It would make them pay,” Wise said before leading a chant.
The organization behind the walkout, Irreplaceable, started two months ago as a response to “the big tech oligarchy that we live under,” said Sara Almosawi, an organizer with the group.
The group has laid out an advocacy plan online, where it wrote that in 2026, “Our job is to meet people where they are at, and turn that anger into real political power, bringing millions of people into the fight.”
“We will lead this movement against the people who are ruining our futures. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos, and all of their student servants in the halls of Congress, we have one message for you: We are demanding a freeze on the AI frontier, and this walkout is just the beginning,” Almosawi said. “We will not stop until we have a future that we can call our own.”