A recent Open Letter started by Australian and US academics, calling for resistance to and refusal of generative artificial intelligence has been the cause of plenty of discussion in the past weeks. While I am not a signatory of this letter for reasons I explained recently in my AI disclaimer, I do support the right of educators to the pledges made in the letter. The fact that I use artificial intelligence and teach other people how to use it, doesn’t mean that I support the apparent inevitability of AI in schools and universities.
In this article, I am going to explain why I support the right of educators and academics to refuse the use of artificial intelligence, why this is not a hypocritical stance from anyone who uses artificial intelligence, and why I believe some of the criticisms levelled against resistors are flawed.
Cover image: Anton Grabolle / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Open Letter
There are actually a few open letters circulating at the moment from various corners of the world and from both industries and education. Publishers have an open letter. Artists and writers have open letters. And academics in the Netherlands have an open letter, which now shares a number of signatories with the Australian and US letter. I will focus on the Australian/US letter, since that is most relevant in my world.
I want to begin by sharing in full the pledges made by the signatories of this open letter. I am sharing these in full here because elsewhere on the internet where this letter has been discussed, it has been very apparent that commenters have been criticising the signatories without having read the letter itself. At times, it appears that people have relied on ChatGPT generated summaries of the letter, and at other times, the contents of the letter have been misinterpreted or misconstrued.
1 — We will not use GenAI to mark or provide feedback on student work, nor to design any part of our courses.
2 — We will not promote institutional GenAI products built on unethically-developed foundation models like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grok or Llama. We will not allow corporate-institutional partnerships to compromise our academic freedom.
3 — We will not accept without evidence the sales agenda of people who are not educators, nor will we spread hype at the expense of student learning and vibrant pedagogy.
4 — We will not train our students to use generative AI tools to replace their own intellectual effort and development. We cannot endorse the automation and exploitation of intellectual and creative labor.
5 — We will not ask students or staff to violate the spirit of academic integrity by promoting the use of unethical products.
6 — We will not rewrite curriculum to insert generative AI into it for the purposes of “scaffolding AI literacy”.
7 — We will not contribute to the erosion of academic freedom and educator agency by forcing educators into compliance with technology they find unethical.
8 — We honor students’ rights to resist and refuse as well.
Not a Call to Ban AI
One prominent criticism of this open letter and others like it has been that they are a backwards attempt to restrain or ban AI and are, variously, “standing in the way of progress”, “Luddism”, or otherwise anti-progress or naive.
The first important point of clarification is that this open letter does not call for a ban on the technology. It calls for the right for individual educators and academics to choose whether they use generative artificial intelligence in their own professional practices, including their creation of course materials, their assessment of students’ work, and discussions of “AI literacy” in the classroom.
It does call for a refusal to incorporate so-called AI literacy units into existing units of work. However, this is not an overstep, since one of the basic tenets of assessment would argue that we should only teach what is actually on our syllabus, and we should only assess what we have actually taught. To my knowledge, outside of computer science, there are very few courses where the syllabus requires instruction in generative AI. There are no courses that I am aware of that have a syllabus outcome requiring educators to teach students how to prompt ChatGPT.
“AI literacy” is often concerned with teaching students to be good technology users. It is not the role of the kindergarten numeracy teacher, the secondary literature teacher, or the tertiary biology teacher to teach students how to use ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, or any other AI application. Nor is it the sole responsibility of these educators to teach students about AI ethics. While I personally believe that the best place to teach AI ethics is through a disciplinary lens – for example, talking about algorithmic bias in health classes or fake news in media studies – it’s not the same as suggesting that every educator now needs to include a unit on AI literacy.
This open letter does not call for educators to ban the technology in their institutes. It does not call for them to impose their refusal of AI on their colleagues or their students. It’s simply an acknowledgement of the right to personally refuse to use the technology.
The Facts Are on Their Side
The basic arguments for why educators might refuse to use artificial intelligence are also on the side of the signatories. This technology is inherently flawed in many ways. The companies who own and profit from this technology are the same companies that have owned and profited from our online lives for over a decade. There is no reason that I can see to cede even more academic freedom or intellectual choice to companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google. There is no reason to unquestioningly support partnerships between universities and companies like OpenAI, either directly or through their strategic partnerships with Learning Management Systems and other edtech.
There are plenty of reasons to oppose these partnerships: the environmental costs, the infringement of copyright and intellectual property rights in the creation of these models, the bias, the privacy concerns, the surveillance and problematic data collection practices of these companies. All of these are valid reasons to resist the use of the technology.
There have been arguments levelled against the signatories of this open letter that resisting artificial intelligence puts them or their students at a disadvantage because “AI can improve critical thinking” or “AI can improve learning outcomes”. None of these statements have yet been proven true, and in some cases they have been directly contradicted. There is no direct evidence that generative artificial intelligence improves learning. Each of the reasons for resisting or refusing generative artificial intelligence laid out in this open letter is valid, articulate and backed up by evidence, which is more than can be said for claims like “AI improves learning”.
“Your Students Will Be Left Behind”
Perhaps the argument I find most insidious is the idea that educators who choose to resist generative artificial intelligence are somehow harming their students. These criticisms have ranged from fairly benign concerns that teachers who don’t talk about AI are burying their heads in the sand, or that their students will not be able to benefit from the supposed advantages of AI, through to harmful claims that these educators are, for some reason, deliberately trying to ruin their students’ futures.
In addressing this criticism, I would first ask: how many educators do you know who have gone into their profession to make life harder for their students? How many educators do you know who would deliberately put their students in harm’s way? I can’t think of any. I’ve worked in education for almost 20 years in both secondary and tertiary. I’ve met teachers who are frustrated. I’ve met teachers who lock horns with students. I’ve met teachers whose old school and perhaps outdated methods in the classroom clash with students that struggle to maintain attention. I’ve met teachers who are burned out, and ultimately are unwilling or unable to form the kinds of relationships with students that are necessary for a healthy teaching career.
But I have never met an educator who deliberately sets out to harm a student.
And the signatories of this open letter do not believe that opting out of generative artificial intelligence in their own personal use will in any way be a barrier to their students learning or thriving in their subject. Most of these arguments stem from discourses of inevitability: you have to teach your students about AI because students will be using AI because AI is inevitable. I’ve pointed out flaws in the inevitability argument in an earlier post. Just because the technology is ubiquitous does not mean that it is inevitable. The language of inevitability serves technology companies, not teachers and not students. Accepting generative artificial intelligence in its current form -environmentally unsustainable, borderline if not entirely illegal, and predicated on inhumane data collection and categorisation processes – accepting all of this as inevitable feels like the opposite of the role educators should be taking.
Podcast episode:The Myth of Inevitable AI
Again, there is no evidence to suggest that a student who does not use artificial intelligence in Literary Studies 101, second year writing composition, third year engineering or Year 10 arts will be somehow at a disadvantage in five to 10 years than their peers whose teacher chose to use generative artificial intelligence.
Consider the ridiculousness of this statement, and then look at the billionaires who currently stand to profit from the “inevitability” of generative artificial intelligence. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg: none of these people had access to AI while they were at school. None of these people had “AI literacy” classes thrust upon them by their English, Science and Humanities teachers, and yet from what I hear about their bank accounts they appear to be doing okay from the technology.
And finally, an open letter such as this does not call for students to immediately stop using the technology. The educators making the choice to sign this open letter are not, for the most part, saying “you cannot use artificial intelligence in my class”. They are saying I choose not to use artificial intelligence in my class.
Resistance and Adoption Can Co-exist
Possibly the most frustrating thing for me as someone notoriously on the fence with artificial intelligence is watching people from either side of the fence throw stones at each other. When educators take to social media to disparage other educators, the technology companies end up winning. When the resisters attack the adopters, they can come across as militant, condescending troublemakers. When the adopters attack the resisters, they can come across as smug techno-positivists or appear to be acting as if they’re in the pockets of the technology companies (which of course, some are… tech companies love giving away freebies in exchange for positive evangelism).
From where I sit, there are perfectly good reasons for some educators to use generative AI and to teach their students how to use it. There are also perfectly good reasons for some educators to resist and refuse artificial intelligence in their own professional practices and their courses. We can have both, and we can have it with civil discourse that doesn’t dissolve into name calling, eye rolling and insults. We are educators. Above all else, we should be concerned with having open, curious discussions with one another, in the interests of learning each other’s positions.
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