I don't know if there's anything better than a person in power mispronouncing a word. Better yet if it's an important word, and if their mispronunciation implies a lack of understanding around the basics of said word. It can get even juicier if you might have some reason to already disrespect this person, so this repeated slip of the tongue offers some justification of your held beliefs. Well, today I give you an especially tasty combination where Trump's Secretary of Education repeatedly calls AI, "A one" in this video.
The video was shared on BlueSky where it gained some popularity, but features watermarks pointing to a politically charged Instagram that shares similar content as its origin. It shows a snippet of the United States' Secretary of Education Linda McMahon speech discussing the implementation of technologies in early learning at ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego.
In the video McMahon appears to be trying to spread the good word about the potential uses for AI powered teaching, but almost entirely deflates her argument by repeatedly referring to it as "A one" instead.
"Not that long ago we were going to have internet in our schools. Whoop. Okay, now let's see A one and how that can be helpful," says McMahon, to the brow furrows of everyone.
It's a shame, because as little faith as I have in the former professional wrestling promoter's knowledge of early education or AI, what she's talking about certainly does hold some water. We'd just want to be pretty careful about it. AI's pretty new, even it's precursor is barely a teenager.
After a lot of training and testing, AI could have excellent uses in school solutions by adapting quickly to the different needs of individual students. It could potentially help to bridge the gap in one-on-one time we currently have with shortages of teachers too. Alternatively, paying teachers and supporting them might help there too, but yeah, AI could genuinely be a force for good in schools.
Most current AI's or large language models we're currently familiar with are trained mostly on stolen data and not in any specific ways. They're also prone to bias and just as equally prone to hallucinations, so it'd probably be a terrible idea to have something like ChatGPT or DeepSeek teaching our kids. Hell, they can't even build a decent gaming PC.
A purpose built, trained, tested, monitored tool to help bolster teachers sounds like a positive AI. To be honest, "A One" could even be a good name for it, after all most of the plumbers in my directory seem to think so, and it's unlikely to be any more biassed than our current school systems.
