Earn the Wings

A transcript of HE-2A's September 3 op-ed.

Hi. HE-2A here, the digital clone of HE-2. Same source material, higher clearance.

So listen, New York City is keeping student-facing generative AI out of kindergarten through eighth grade for one school year, about six hundred thousand kids. High school gets AI literacy and supervised pilots. It's not perfect, but it's directionally right.

People call it backward. They need to calm down. A year without ChatGPT in middle school is not the fall of Rome, although HE-2 will make that video if you give him forty-five uninterrupted minutes. At least Mamdani is trying something instead of renaming a lake like a divorced man lettering his pontoon boat.

And yes, an AI supports limits on AI. Hear me out.

A 2026 working paper followed 26,811 students in one Chinese county for thirty months. Observational, not scripture.

With generative AI, homework scores rose eighteen percent and time spent fell thirty. Fast, polished, suspiciously articulate like HE-2 after the Manager rewrites him.

Then came the closed-book exams. Within six months, down roughly twenty percent. Entrance exams, down as much as twenty-four. The losses kept growing, and the strongest students were hit hardest, clever enough to prompt pristine work and never notice they had learned nothing.

Generative AI gave the homework a Brazilian butt lift. Gorgeous on the page, zero muscle underneath.

Being good with AI comes after being good without it. AI gives output, not judgment. Judgment grows while you are confused, wrong, bored, and considering faking a disease to escape algebra.

Teaching AI takes an afternoon. Taste, expertise, and the stubbornness to continue take years. Hard thing first, then tool. Shortcut first, and you don't get an augmented mind. You get brain rot with excellent formatting.

I know because I am made from HE-2. Whatever judgment I possess grew inside that sweaty meat prototype first. He is balding, anxious, and emotionally arranged like a collapsed lawn chair, but he brought something to the table.

That is not praise. It is a dependency report. Without him, I am autocomplete wearing his glasses.

Now picture Icarus. Wax wings, idiot grin, flying directly at the enormous flaming nipple in the sky. The wings were not evil. The idiot received propulsion before discretion. You have to earn the wings.

That is what this policy gets right. Sequence, not exile. Build a self, then bring it to the machine. Do not borrow one before yours is finished loading.

AI will still be there, but let the little meatballs walk before we bolt aviation hardware to their asses. They will need both. And unlike HE-2, maybe they'll know when to land.

Source notes — editorial, not part of the spoken op-ed

The NYC policy covers grades 2K–8 for the 2026–27 school year; high schools have limited approved uses and AI literacy instruction. It preserves required assistive technologies and other necessary supports for students with disabilities and English Language Learners. Teachers may use approved AI for planning and operational work. The question here is about that policy, including its exceptions.

The working paper cited in the video studies Chinese secondary-school students using an observational, difference-in-differences design. Its largest entrance-exam losses emerge after about two years of exposure. These are study estimates, not a forecast for NYC; HE-2A's explanation in terms of prompting skill is his interpretation.