The Ban Debate

Seven out of ten Canadians want AI chatbots banned for anyone under 16.^[4] The province of Manitoba is already moving to ban them.^[5] Senators heard from expert after expert who said these tools are dangerous for young people. But Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, told the Senate that banning chatbots would be a mistake.^[6]

His argument is simple. A 15-year-old who cannot use ChatGPT does not stop using AI. They find something else – a service from another country with no safety rules, no filters, and no one watching out for them. Banning the tools you can see pushes kids toward tools you cannot see.

Geist's alternative: instead of banning AI, force AI companies to be honest. He wants a law called an AI Transparency Act. It would require companies to tell the public:

• What safety rules they follow
• When they report users to police
• What age limits they set
• What they do with your data

Not a ban. Accountability. But there is a gap in his argument.

The Gap in the Middle

But a professor named Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon, who teaches health ethics at Simon Fraser University, sees a problem with both the ban and the transparency approach.^[7]

When there are no laws, companies write their own rules. And their rules tend to serve the company, not the users. After the Tumbler Ridge school shooting (described in Part 1), OpenAI promised to start reporting dangerous users directly to Canada's national police, the RCMP. That sounds responsible. But think about what it means: a private company now decides which of your private conversations get sent to the police. No court ordered it. No elected official wrote the rules. No independent person reviews the decisions.^[8]

Bélisle-Pipon wrote: "It is not regulation of AI. It is regulation of the people who use AI."^[8:1]

The ban debate asks whether kids should use chatbots. The deeper question is who makes the rules about what happens when they do.

The Layers of Watching

The monitoring does not start with ChatGPT. It starts much earlier.

First, the device. Many schools give students Chromebooks – laptop computers made by Google. Google recently installed a 4 GB AI program on all of these devices without asking.^[9] No principal was told. No parent was asked. That story is told in "The Uninvited Guest" series.

Then, the monitoring software. A program called GoGuardian^[10] watches 27 million students in more than 10,000 schools. It reads their searches, their messages, and their keystrokes. In Minneapolis, it outed an LGBTQ+ student to their parents by flagging the words "gay" and "lesbian."^[11] Another program, Gaggle,^[12] watches 6 million students. When a parent in Kansas tried to opt out, the school said it was not possible. The parent had to sue.^[13]

Finally, the chatbot. Now Trusted Contact monitors the conversations students have when they turn to AI because they are too afraid to talk to a person.

At every layer, the watching is called "safety." At no layer is there strong proof that it works. A 2023 study by RAND, a research organization, found "scant evidence" that student monitoring tools actually prevent harm.^[14]

An empty classroom. The question is not whether devices belong here. It is who decides what runs on them. Photo: CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Schools That Built Something Different

In 1984, a famous novel by George Orwell, the government watched everyone through screens that could not be turned off.^[15] The only people who lived outside the surveillance were called "the proles" – ordinary working people the government did not bother to watch. Orwell wrote: "If there is hope, it lies in the proles."^[16]

The proles in the novel never organized. But in 2026, some schools did. The University of Missouri built its own AI system on its own computers, run by its own staff.^[17] No outside company reads the data.

A school in Montreal called The Study built an AI named Rosie on its own equipment, working with a company called Sage.Education.^[18] The students at The Study use Rosie as a foundation. They build their own AI tools on top of it. They choose which tools to use. The school controls what runs on its own devices.

Sage.is AI-UI, the platform that powers Sage.Education, works like this:^[19]

• The code is open. Anyone can read it and check what it does.^[20]
• The data stays on the school's own computers. It does not go to a company's servers.
• The school chooses which AI to connect. It is not locked into one company.^[21]
• There are no hidden programs scanning conversations.
• There is no corporate team reading flagged messages.
• The school writes the rules. The school can turn it off.

This approach is not perfect. Running your own AI takes technical skill that many schools do not have yet. It takes money for equipment and people to maintain it. But it proves something important: the way things work now (where companies watch students and call it safety) is a choice, not the only option.^[19:1]

Visibility, Not Surveillance

The difference between surveillance and visibility matters here.

Surveillance means someone reads your private thoughts without telling you. You do not know the rules. You did not agree to them. Visibility is different. It means the teacher can see what the student is doing, and the student knows it. The rules are clear to both sides. The data stays in the building.

Sage.Education was built on this idea.^[22] The teacher sees the student's process. The student knows the teacher can see. Nobody is hiding anything. That is not surveillance. That is a classroom.

"The response that Tumbler Ridge demands is not more efficient surveillance of users but a regulatory architecture that addresses the systems themselves." — Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon^[8:2]

The Question

The senators are debating whether to ban the chatbot. The Privacy Commissioner found that the chatbot broke the law. The chatbot just launched a feature that monitors the very conversations the senators are debating.

Three conversations, one country, one week.

The question is not whether to ban AI or to allow it. It is not whether to monitor students or leave them alone.

The question is: who decides what runs on the devices in your school, what happens to the conversations your students have, and whose rules apply when something goes wrong?

Some schools have already answered that question. They built their own rooms. They wrote their own rules. And unlike a chatbot controlled by a company in San Francisco, theirs has an off switch.

This is Part 3 of a 3-part series based on "The Arsonist's Smoke Detector." The views expressed are those of the editorial board. Full disclosure and transparency is a feature, not a bug.

Sage.is AI-UI and Sage.Education are products of Startr LLC; their inclusion represents a disclosure of interest. No individuals quoted were interviewed; all quotes are from published sources. Full disclosure and transparency is a feature, not a bug.