NY high school to pilot humanoid robot, teachers call it inappropriate
Me and my friends would've killed the humanoid robot high school teacher with hammers I can tell you that much.
JK, me and my friends would've just drawn mean comics about the humanoid robot high school teacher.
Horrible!! Is that what it looks like??? That alone is a HUGE issue! Young girls have enough trouble feeling good about their looks without that thing being held up as an example!
My class of middle schoolers would have done every logic bomb and audio distraction in the books (and probably invent a few new ones) and force the AI teacher into a meltdown without ever touching the poor thing.
This is the history of a super legit company. "Realbotix, formerly Tokens.com, a Toronto-based company, purchased Simulacra, a Las Vegas-based company known for realistic sex dolls, for $16.7m in April 2024, marking a pivot for the company from crypto to humanoid robots."
Wouldn't that have disrupted all the others trying to fuck it?
'The robot, named Sally, was purchased by the Cattaraugus county school district – which includes Salamanca high school – for $57,590. ...'
A Western New York school district has halted its plans to place a humanoid robot in a classroom after a New York Focus report on the plan sparked fierce debate over the use of artificial intelligence in schools and backlash from local parents.
They already spent $58K on this! I wanna know how much they’re paying real teachers
Sincere thanks for covering this story!!!
How in the fuck could you be a member of a school board or a school administrator and think that your priority should be to bring in a humanoid fucking robot into the kids classroom? Everyone should resign in shame.
GOOD. SHAME THIS BULLSHIT WHEREVER YOU SEE IT.
Reason to support local journalism #42,917
you're telling me not everyone was on board with letting the sexbot company put a robot in a public school classroom? bsky.app/profile/nysf...
This school district is about an hour from where I grew up and oh, the rage within me when I saw this initial reporting, I am grateful a stop was put to this, we cannot accept this - these are literally experiments companies want to do on children under the guise of educating them. Despicable.
I will note for those who scoff: Sometimes state oversight is good and protects students.
A real story and there’s no paywall and it delivers the goods LOL
The parents had to find out through the news?!?!
I cannot believe they had to have a public backlash to tell them this was a terrible, ridiculous, nonsensical idea.
don’t just hit the pause button; scrap that shit
Commissioner Rosa remains one of NYS's greatest public education (and student) advocates and goodness, we are lucky to have her.
‘Really inappropriate’: teachers decry plan for humanoid robot in New York high school
They could have hired a teaching assistant with that money. Plus the fact that it's a school with a large indigenous population is definitely, uh... a choice.
Why does the robot in the image look like one of those sex dolls? People couldn’t afford them and they needed to repurpose them, orrr???
It's ridiculous. Students will have less respect for an object than they do real teachers. The only thing it will teach is divisiveness. As a teacher, I often need to pivot my approach to reach kids all over the spectrum, that can't be programmed, it takes years of knowing them as individuals.
That robot would be covered in spit balls within the first hour.
Looking at the article, the robot pictured is NOT the robot being used in the school. Although all pictures of their robots look equally creepy.
"Realbotix has denied ties to the sex doll company" So why does she look like that, then? "Out of all the schools in New York state ... they chose to experiment on Native American children yet again" 👍 Completely off the mark, utterly tone-deaf.
notice they're only doing this in schools with large minority populations.
Creepy and scary at the same time:
Putting a sex doll in classroom isn't going help teach teenage boys that women are people.
if someone seriously suggests replacing your child's teacher with a phone taped to recycled sex doll, you are allowed to punch them
One of the points I make in The Celluloid Specimen is that behaviorists were drawn to classroom tech for the same reasons they used lab animals: complete control over the environment and surveillance of the bodies in them. Schools were where you tested and refined ideas, tech, etc. And, well...
this reality sucks so fucking hard
everything about this story is offensive lol, yeah we spent 60 grand for the sex bot turned into uuuuh a skeevy LLM prompt. kids who wants a sexy and unsettling google interface. its not sentient, doesn't understand context, can't properly diagnose and guide students, but its also creepy n costly.
How did this even get approved? So you spent nearly $60,000 in public funds...on an...AI robot...from a company that pivoted to robotics from crypto...and bought a sex doll company...
"Realbotix, formerly Tokens.com ... purchased Simulacra, a Las Vegas-based company known for realistic sex dolls ... marking a pivot for the company from crypto to humanoid robots." Big titty sex doll AI teacher robots from a former crypto company, that's the full distillation of the Trump era
School/university boards/administrators seem to make decisions about "AI" in the classroom solely on hype, tech FOMO etc rather than basing them on research on pedagogy and what works for classrooms and students. The only ones benefiting are AI companies. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
And if you're reading the Guardian article on the company that acquired sexbot company now selling a nearly 60k "AI-enabled robots" to a primarily Native American school district, I think this thread is also essential reading, bsky.app/profile/jgca...
Why does it look like a woman with maga make-up?
send all these abominations to Philly 😏
You just KNOW that some teenage boy will get handsy. P
the worst AI scammers always have the same backstory
My senior capstone students, many of whom are matriculating into K-12 programs once they complete undergrad, did their research projects on AI and education; all were dismayed by its use with children. One said “I want to be a teacher to teach kids, not uneducate(sp) them”
The teachers' union at the New York high school set to have a humanoid robot this fall speaks out for the first time here I also talked to locals and @nysut.bsky.social president Melinda Pearson www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
Really says it all they can find six figures for fleshlight robot teachers but not money for human teachers to live on
*erases number from my “days without setting new dystopian low” scoreboard*
Latest update is they have decided this is a bad idea, which should have been obvious from the start.
$57k for that crap?! think of all the real good that money could do. that’s wages for a real human teacher. or field trips, or student counseling, or infrastructure repairs
The decision to give it makeup and highlights.
So they can afford to waste money on a repurposed sex doll "teacher" but they can't afford to pay real teachers a decent wage? Or buy supplies? Fix up the school? Negate any "lunch debts" or other malicious nonsense? "It was discussed at the school board meeting" is an obnoxious excuse, too.
didn't i say? i fuckin said
Everyone who was in a position to say ‘don’t do this’ and didn’t has to be replaced with Real Dolls.
Horrors aside...do u really think this bucket of bolts posing as a teacher will survive a room full of children/teenagers 5 minutes tops until that thing gets utterly obliterated
okay before i transferred schools i was part of the 'terrorizing folks because bored' crew and all i can think of is...you really, REALLY want to annoy students with a SEX DOLL? you think this'll go well?
we have a pathological relationship to education in this country. absolute insane hostility to children
You acquire*one* sex-doll company and suddenly everyone's calling you the sex-doll acquirer.
“Realbotix has denied ties to the sex doll company” dawg look at it
First article on this to significantly include the Seneca Nation's point of view:
Why does it have Mar-a-Lago face
This is a cursed sentence
Robot from company that acquired sex doll maker to be introduced in school with large Native American population
Everything about this is extraordinarily disturbing (including the Mar-a-Lago face). Kids’ socioemotional development comes from interacting with *humans*. And Native American kids should not be put through this. Instead of #AI, #fascism, and #climate change, how about we start taking care of kids?!
Sex toy robots in schools?
A lot of these words should not be next to each other.
Horrifying. You can't make this stuff up.
File under a new hashtag: "dystopian ledes"
'No one here can help you, but you can talk to the creepy robot sex doll. But: no one here can help you.' This is gross, and especially for a school with a large Indigenous pop. Yes, let's tell those kids they're not even worth having a human to interact with. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...