I have been thinking about the ways that so much of the AI discourse in education spaces these last few years has tried to split teachers and students- to make teachers suspicious of students and to make it so that students are surveilled in all sorts of new ways. I think we need to avoid this discourse as much as possible. AI companies and their boosters benefit from this split.
We need to recognize that our students are navigating this moment with us- and they are being told one thing by AI companies (i.e. that AI can ‘help’ them in their studies, that they can and should use it as a shortcut for intellectual labor, that they MUST learn how to use it) and we educators are being told similar things (that we MUST teach our students how to use AI, that it can ‘help’ us, that it is inevitable, etc.).
I think we need to start seeing our students as collaborators and partners in working through all of these kinds of claims and the ways that AI is being imposed on us without our consent. To that end I have been thinking about a variety of ways to talk to my students about AI in the coming Fall- and not to just talk to them about it, but to help them understand it and not from the Boosters’ perspectives- they do not need me for that- but from a skeptical perspective- one that offers them a different understanding of this technology and its impact on all of us.
One of the ways I am thinking about this is through the lens of theft. A lens that argues that AI companies and their boosters are stealing from us in order to pad their bottom lines and create revenue streams for their own benefit and to the detriment of all of us.
So here are 5 theses on AI theft in education. ( this is a first set of thoughts in this direction. I would love to hear what I am missing here).
5 Theses on AI theft in education
- AI companies are stealing our property. AI chatbots have been trained in part by being fed academic and artistic material produced by many teachers around the country and the world without their consent. When any of us use chatbots by putting our writing into them, or asking them questions that activity turns into further training data. I realize there are some guardrails to this- but most people are not using LLMs with those guardrails built in- as this often requires a paid subscription and AI companies are banking on most people not paying those fees so we end up working for these companies- training their slop machines further for them.
- AI companies are stealing our classrooms and the important relationships between teachers and students. Fears about AI based cheating have caused further damage to the most important part of the educational process- the trust between teacher and student. Every other day we can find articles, podcasts, forum discussions about how to ‘catch’ students cheating with AI, or how students feel increasingly surveilled by teachers and ‘guilty until proven innocent’ of potentially cheating with LLMs. Yet, we all see AI companies marketing their slop machines for this exact purpose to students. It does not matter how much or little cheating has increased- the damage is being done merely through the loud and constant refrain of this topic. And AI companies benefit from it no matter how it is framed.
- AI companies are stealing our intellectual skills and their development. As we learn more about the ways AI use as a replacement for intellectual labor impacts educational skills development we see that its use lowers the development of critical thinking and other skills that are core to the educational mission that schools are tasked with and students go to schools to develop.
- AI companies are stealing our creativity. As students (and faculty) turn to AI for certain tasks we develop a mistaken view that the slop machines are better at certain things than we are. Students start to think the machines are better writers than they are (I have already seen this internalized by students on my campus multiple times), better at organizing thoughts, better at ‘brainstorming’ tasks (they are machines and have no brains), better at organizing and taking notes, better at artistic production, etc. Once we give these things over to the slop machines, we begin to devalue our own creativity as a core part of what it is to be human.
- AI companies are stealing our environmental futures. the energy usage of AI data centers is unlike any other technology and those data centers are still primarily powered by climate change inducing fossil fuels. Data center placement is eating up more land, and the polluting effects of running such data centers is felt both globally in the greenhouse gas emissions that have no boundary and locally, in communities where these data centers are placed.
Geoff Pfeifer 