Back to School is Better Without "AI"
It’s that time of year again, when fall is in the air and “AI” is back and worse than ever, creepy-crawling into every corner of our education system.
It’s that time of year again, when fall is in the air and “AI” is back and worse than ever, creepy-crawling into every corner of our education system.
Use “AI”, or flunk out?
This semester, Ohio State University announced that every single one of its first-year students will be required to study “AI” use — call it “AI” adoption by force! — and that “AI” will be embedded “into the core of every undergraduate curriculum.”
And OSU is far from the only college incorporating new and dubious tech at every level. At the University of Hawaii, university-official “friendly” chatbots are checking in on students’ well-being, and institutions from UCLA to the University of Maryland have hired highly-compensated new chief “AI” officers (CAIO) to coordinate the introduction of “AI” for faculty and students.
This week at Bloomberg, Vauhini Vara dug into the billion dollar industry behind the push from big companies to introduce AI into every stage of a US students’ educational life. OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have all poured money into creating “education-centered” versions of their products, Vara reports, in an effort to produce a new generation of AI “super users.” Now they’re working overtime to convince students, teachers, school administrators, universities and politicians to buy in.
Even some unions supposed to represent the interest of education workers have capitulated to the hype wave. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, announced in July that the union is partnering with Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI to train 40,000 teachers to use “AI.” (We talked about this at length in one of our recent episodes, “Et Tu, American Federation of Teachers”. Listen here.)
How about no?
There are some bright spots of resistance. At the end of August, members of the California Faculty Association, which represents over 29,000 higher education workers in the state, attended a joint oversight hearing with California Assembly members and pushed back on plans to make the California State University system the country’s first “(AI)-empowered university system.”
Elaine Villanueva Bernal, a chemistry and biochemistry lecturer at CSU Long Beach, told the hearing they were concerned about the plan’s implications for their students’ data privacy, their critical thinking abilities, lack of faculty input in “AI” adoption, and budget inequity.
“CSU has already spent $17 million on this initiative,” Villanueva Bernal said, noting that in the same period Sonoma State university had faced the largest layoffs in its history, with departments closed, and athletics eliminated. “This juxtaposition reveals CSU’s budget priorities: flashy tech and corporate partnerships over the livelihoods of workers and the stability of our campuses.”
And in Ireland last week, lectures at Trinity College Dublin penned an open letter pushing back on vice-provost Professor Orla Sheils claims that “AI” could “democratize” education.
“We have carefully followed the debate about the role of GenAI in higher education,” the lecturers wrote in the Irish Times. “We have learned about how GenAI works and its educational, social, environmental and economic impacts. What we have learned leads us to deliberately avoid GenAI in our own work and to emphasise authentic human thinking and experience in our teaching.”
Our take
At Mystery AI Hype 3000, we’ve been thinking about “AI” and education for years. Emily’s written about how there’s no place for ChatGPT in the classroom, and in chapter four of The AI Con, Alex and Emily pointed out that “AI” tools that are marketed as a “a means to expand student creativity” in the classroom end up being “used for surveillance,” and perpetuating existing inequalities.
“If we don’t get off the hype train,” Alex and Emily write in The AI Con, “most students [will] find themselves in classrooms led by harried, precariously employed adjunct faculty, who the academic administration expects to handle overfull classes by using these automated tools in lieu of actual instruction.”
Here are a few podcast episodes to prime you to pop the hype with the sharpest pin available:
Et Tu, American Federation of Teachers?: In our most recent education-themed episode, we talk to former English teacher Dr. Charles Logan about how the AFT, OpenAI and Microsoft are apparently partnering up to market AI to teachers under the guise of free professional development and training. (Livestream, Podcast, Transcript)
Back to School with AI Hype in Education: We chat to education PhD student Haley Lepp about LLM hype in education spaces — whether they're pitched as ways to reduce teacher workloads, increase accessibility, or simply "democratize learning and knowing" in the Global South. (Livestream, Podcast, Transcript)
Universities Anxiously Buy in to the Hype: Dr. Chris Gilliard aka "Hypervisible" tells us about the wave of universities adopting AI-driven educational technologies, and the lack of protections they offer students in terms of data privacy or even emotional safety. (Livestream, Podcast, Transcript)
Billionaires, Influencers and Ed Tech: DAIR Research Fellow Adrienne Williams, a former educator, shares her experiences and explains why billionaires want to put LLMs in every classroom. (Livestream, Podcast, Transcript)
What we learned at Digital Learning Week
Emily addressed some of these issues in her recent public lecture at UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week, a gathering of scholars and policy makers from all over the world that aimed to chart “pathways for equitable, ethical and human-driven AI integration in education, ensuring technology serves as a force for inclusive progress.”
What Emily pointed out afterwards is that almost all of the conversations around the inclusion of “AI” education miss one key thing: we actually don’t have to do it. There is nothing inevitable about the incorporation of “AI” into any part of our lives, especially education, unless you buy into the hype from tech CEOs and TESCREALs who stand to benefit from it.
Emily had the privilege of presenting early in the event, meaning that everyone who spoke later was doing so in the context of her remarks problematizing “AI” and calling out the marketing. It was particularly stark when Simon Leung, Vice-Chairman on event sponsor NetDragon, used his time on the panel to play a 10 minute infomercial for this company’s products.
"I have to admit I'm a little bit nervous because we are a technology company and I'm trying to give away a lot of our product for free,” he said before showing the video. “So listening to [a] professor talking about you need to be very careful..."
This was clearly in reaction to Emily’s exhortation to education decision makers to be very skeptical of the offerings of tech companies, even when they are ostensibly offered “for free”, since they are not, in fact, free. Tech companies are interested in access to student data, in hooking students as life-long customers, in normalizing their tech, and in reputation-washing.
You can watch Emily’s whole speech here and read her written intervention (p.41-45) too! And she also added some reflections from the conference about what “human-centered” really means when talking about “AI” in education:
Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people. [contains quote post or other embedded content]
— Emily M. Bender (@emilymbender.bsky.social) 2025-09-03T10:35:05.606Z
Our book, The AI Con, is now available wherever fine books are sold!
