In Russia, artificial intelligence will identify ‘dangerous schoolchildren’ from their essays

The Russian government will allocate 1.7 billion rubles to create a system for identifying ‘socially dangerous and destructive behavior among schoolchildren’ through analysis of their written work. The report is by «Ведомости».

According to the explanatory note to the draft federal budget for 2022, expenses for developing the software are included in the national programme ‘Social Activity’. In 2022 and 2023, 551.1 million rubles will be allocated for the development of the system that analyzes written works, and in 2024 — 555.7 million.

The rising incidents of violence in schools pushed the development of such tools, said Oleg Smolin, a State Duma deputy and a member of the CPRF faction.

According to child psychiatrist Pavel Zaitsev, certain behavioural patterns are indeed trackable in written works. However, this concerns only texts on free topics, the specialist added.

“To identify a person’s psychological characteristics and inclinations, linguists-psychologists collect a large corpus of his letters, posts on social networks, and literary works,” Zaitsev said.

The president of Kribrum, the company developing a system to monitor texts on social networks, questions the advisability of creating the software. He regards the stated cost of 1.7 billion rubles as two to three times inflated.

Dmitry Lesnyak, a lawyer at BMS Law Firm, also warned of unpredictable consequences of deploying such systems. In his view, teachers and classmates will become biased against students who fall under the algorithms’ gaze, and parents will drift away from their children.

The Ministry of Education and the Government did not disclose details of the project or its timeline.

Earlier in August, United Russia proposed to restrict the use of AI in sensitive areas, such as medicine and education.

In early August, in Saint Petersburg, a software suite with artificial intelligence for social-network analytics was presented, which identifies users of ‘death groups’ or teenagers with suicidal tendencies.

In July, the Ministry of Education proposed to employ AI to check students’ homework.

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