Two of New York’s most recognizable figures, Mayor Zohran Mamdadi and activist‑actor Ilana Glazer of “Broad City,” discussed artificial intelligence at Webster Hall on Monday night. Glazer asked the mayor about how AI will shape society, and Mamdadi urged residents not to accept the notion that AI will inevitably take their jobs, influence their children’s minds, or erode their dignity. He encouraged New Yorkers to reclaim control at a time when the federal government has offered little regulation, leaving municipalities to act on their own.
Speaking at The People’s AI Assembly, an event organized by the AI Now Institute—a research group that studies the social impact of AI—Mamdadi argued that the rapid rollout of the technology is not unavoidable and that public officials must hold AI firms accountable. In February he issued a ban on AI tools in elementary and middle schools. Glazer, a mother, said the presence of AI in classrooms makes her uneasy. “It just makes me nervous. It feels so non‑consensual, as though … this has to be in schools. It wasn’t two years ago. Why does it have to be in schools?” she asked.
Over the summer the mayor also unveiled a rule requiring landlords, brokers and real‑estate platforms to clearly label when a property’s photos or videos have been generated with AI. The measure is intended to protect renters from “house‑phishing,” or being misled by fabricated listings. Both initiatives challenge the assumption that schools and the public must simply accept AI as it arrives.
“Nothing has to be,” Mamdadi told the audience on Monday. “There’s a creep that comes with this, and there’s an intent to overwhelm that leaves people feeling as if there is simply no option.” He criticized what he called a “reckless adoption of technology without any kind of reckoning with the limitations of that technology,” pointing to the U.S. military’s February strike on a school in Iran that killed more than 150 people, including at least 123 children. Officials involved in the Pentagon’s internal investigation have told Bloomberg that overreliance on AI in targeting was one factor in the attack.
“There is this desire to speak about AI as if it is infallible, as if it cannot be questioned, as if the only people who can regulate it are the ones who are currently developing it,” Mamdadi said, recalling similar arguments made by Facebook in 2008. He added that the stance is essentially an effort to avoid accountability while preserving potential market valuations ahead of IPOs. Anthropic is expected to go public this year, and OpenAI has announced plans for a 2027 listing.
Mamdadi denounced the “complete abdication of federal law” on AI. “At a national level, when the conversation is about artificial intelligence, it’s so often framed in this language of an arms race with China, and any humanistic concern we just push to the side in a language of national competition,” he said. President Donald Trump’s Superintelligence Task Force, announced earlier this month, largely focuses on allowing powerful AI companies to self‑regulate rather than imposing new federal restrictions. That approach persists despite growing alarm about AI’s impact on every aspect of life, including warnings from whistleblowers at Anthropic, Google DeepMind and OpenAI that unchecked AI could threaten human survival.
“As we are looking at what comes after this federal administration, there has to be a very different kind of framework in how we think about AI, talk about AI, the accountability we’re willing to bring forward when it comes to that,” Mamdadi concluded.