New this year at Miami Palmetto Senior High, the platform LightSpeed Artificial Intelligence has been implemented to monitor and survey devices under the school WiFi network. The AI is said to look for keywords that may be threatening or dangerous toward the school or students. The software is not designed to search through private information, as some might think. 

“AI is never gonna pick up on like, ‘oh, I want to tell my mom to come and pick me up.’ AI doesn’t look at that. It’s not even programmed to look at those things. It’s programmed to look at things that are more hateful in nature and more dangerous in nature, like guns and bombs and stuff like that,” MPSH Assistant Principal Jesus Tellechea said. 

The idea behind and reason for implementing the AI was in response to how society has been, along with the mandates and stricter filters placed on the school system and the internet inside those systems. 

Privacy is said to not be a concern, as the AI is doing just the same as apps or internet providers do. Only Lightspeed is not monitoring that as much; the main focus and concerns are threats to the school and students. 

“This isn’t anything that you aren’t already sharing with every provider that you have. Your phone is a wealth of information that gets sent back and forth to everyone from Apple to Google. So in terms of privacy, you wouldn’t be able to have a phone if privacy was your biggest concern,” Tellechea said. 

The system is not intended as an invasion of privacy, but as a safety measure to ensure the protection of the school, students and staff members. 

“Lightspeed AI is almost like a filtration system that kind of takes packets as [students] send them back and forth,” Tellechea said. 

MPSH installed this program with the hopes that students and parents can understand the program is for protection, as well as better of the school, and not to harm students.