Two “darlings” of New York – Mayor Zohran Mamdani ( Zohran Mamdani ) and activist and star of “ Broad City ”, Elna Greizer ( Ilana Glazer ) – engaged in a dialogue about artificial intelligence at the Webster Hall in Manhattan on Monday night. Greizer asked the mayor questions to discuss the future of AI in society.
Mamdani encourages New Yorkers to resist that sense of oppression that "_AI is destined to take away jobs, affect children's minds, and deprive them of dignity," and instead to reclaim control.
He stated that these remarks were made against the backdrop of the federal government having almost no regulation over AI, leaving the responsibility for addressing the issue to each city. At the event “The People’s AI Assembly” organized by AI Now Institute, a think tank that studies the social impacts of AI, Mamdani believed that the rapid spread of this technology was not inevitable and that public officials should hold AI companies accountable.
Last month, Mamdani ordered the prohibition of the use of AI in elementary and middle schools. As a parent, Greizer said that the presence of AI in the classrooms made her feel uneasy.
“This really makes me nervous. I feel very reluctant; it’s as if… schools must have this thing. It wasn’t there even two years ago. Why does it have to be included in schools?” she said.
This summer, the mayor also introduced a policy that requires landlords, real estate agents, and real estate platforms to clearly disclose when property photos or videos are generated by AI. The purpose of this policy is to protect New Yorkers from being deceived by “house-phished”, that is, from misleading property information.
Both of these measures challenge the assumption that schools and the public must passively accept the arrival of AI.
"Nothing is essential," Mamdani said at the event on Monday. "Such things seep in quietly, with an intent to overwhelm everything, making one feel that they have no choice at all."
He said that there is a tendency in society to recklessly adopt technology without seriously examining its limitations, and mentioned the airstrike launched by the U.S. military on an Iranian school in February this year, which resulted in the death of more than 150 people, at least 123 of whom were children. Officials involved in an internal investigation by the Pentagon told Bloomberg that over-reliance on AI for target identification was one of the reasons for the strike.
“People have a desire to present [AI] as flawless, as if it were beyond question, as if the only ones who can regulate it are the very people developing it,” said Mamdani, noting that Facebook also made similar arguments in 2008. “Its real purpose,” he continued, “is to evade accountability at any level without compromising the valuation potential of IPO.”
Anthropic is expected to make its debut in the public market this year, while OpenAI indicates that it will be listed in 2027.
Mamdani criticized that in the matter of AI, federal law "has completely abdicated its responsibilities."
"At the national level, when people talk about artificial intelligence, they often frame it in terms of a arms race with China, and any concerns regarding the humanistic aspects are pushed to one side in the name of national competition," said the mayor.
U.S. President Donald Trump announced an "Super Intelligence Working Group" earlier this month, which primarily focuses on allowing powerful AI companies to self-regulate, rather than imposing new federal restrictions. Despite growing concerns from outside parties about the impact of AI on all aspects of human life, including warnings from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI whistleblowers who claim that AI could lead to human extinction, this arrangement remains in place.
"When we think about what the federal government will look like in the future, we must think about AI, discuss AI, and what we are willing to push for in terms of accountability, using a completely different framework," said Mamdani.
