A girl in Winnipeg named Qyra Francisco is in the eighth grade at General Wolfe School. She recently said something that is hard to take back. Like many immigrant families, her parents didn’t have the chance to get a good formal education. As a child, I got a simple message from my parents: finish school and take care of your family. There was no one to turn to when homework got too hard or too complicated to figure out on your own. So she talked to an AI bot. It worked, too.
This is the uncomfortable truth behind Manitoba‘s decision to ban AI chatbots for people under 16—a decision that Premier Wab Kinew says is needed to protect kids from technology that is making them addicted and making money off of their attention, which is hurting their mental health in real ways. He’s not wrong about the bigger issue. But the ban as it stands doesn’t seem to make a big difference between a predatory social media algorithm and a homework assistant that is used in a classroom with care.
Donovan Ponce, a STEM teacher at General Wolfe, has spent time planning lessons on how to use AI in a responsible way. His method is purposely led by humans. Students learn which chatbot tools are okay with the school district, how to come up with ideas without outsourcing thinking, and how to simplify hard text without replacing understanding. When he learned about the ban, he said it came as “a bit of a shock.” I think that response is real. Not crazy or political, just the real shock of someone doing careful, thought-out work and then finding it entangled in a much bigger policy decision.
You should pay attention to what Ponce said next. AI as a teaching tool and AI as a replacement for human connection are two very different things, according to him. In class, he fights against the latter. He often tells the students that chatbots are not real people. That a relationship with software is not the same thing for real life. That difference is important, and it’s the kind of complex thinking that a simple ban based on age might not be able to capture.
The students are more calm than the argument going on around them. Mary Wah, a 9th grader at General Wolfe, doesn’t think it should be illegal at all. Her classmate Shamira Salazar would rather have age-appropriate limits than a full block. Denys Kotochihov, who is from Ukraine and moved to Manitoba and uses chatbots to help him learn English, gets it. The problem is not the tool itself, but how it is used. These aren’t extreme views. The teens who wrote them are pretty smart; they live in technology and have thought about it more than some adults seem to think.
Principal Susan Darazsi said something that seems quietly important. They are already talking about how to get around the ban, she said. The sign doesn’t mean that the kids are bad; it means that the policy isn’t working. If planning a workaround for a rule right away is the response, the rule probably isn’t fixing the problem. It’s just being moved.
It’s still not clear how Manitoba plans to enforce this in schools or how teachers would tell the difference between an approved AI-based learning platform and the type of open chatbot that the province wants to limit. Ponce wants to know what to do. That reasonable, specific, and useful request has not yet been met with something real.
There is a good reason to limit the more harmful things that AI and social media do to kids’ attention spans. That case should be made and dealt with. But keeping kids safe isn’t the same as just getting rid of something until a better plan comes along. Manitoba might be the first to try. It looks a lot like the second one right now.
