Geoff Pfeifer

5 Theses on AI Theft in Education

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.

Some Reflections on AI and Higher Education, Part 1

There is a fresh round of AI cheating hysteria as a result of a recent NY Magazine article and also another round of recent articles reports on professors using AI to give feedback on assignments sparking outrage from a few students. I think articles likes these are not helpful at all in thinking through the current moment in higher education and the problems that AI chatbots pose for our work. Rather, all they do is sensationalize the issues and maybe worse, they contribute to an arms race pitting students against faculty that ultimately benefits no one except the companies who make this technology and then work to push it into the project of higher education- not because they genuinely think these technologies are useful, but because it benefits their bottom line. The news media that eats stories like these up and over and over again decries AI as putting an ‘end’ to education as we know it, is itself playing a role in the destruction of not only the vital trust relationship between students and professors that is necessary for teaching and learning, but also the larger project of education that they seem to be so worriedly reporting on.

I do get it, the creep of LLMs into higher ed needs considering, and these technologies can certainly be used to undermine some methods that have been core to higher ed, like the classroom essay and such. This creep has made me change some things in my classrooms, and we know that certain processes like drafting and peer review work can be protective against AI driven student intellectual labor displacement but I also think- and I will keep beating this drum- if we talk to our students about it (which we should!- they need to understand these technologies. And we do also) we find out that they recognize AI slop faster than we do. And they mostly hate it as much as we do—hence the shock of the students in the recent article about the professor who is using it. Student cheating has always been around, and it will always be for some students. I do not see that fundamentally being changed by any of this.

This is not to say that we should ignore the ways these technologies make it easier (in some ways) for students to do less intellectual labor especially in the humanities and other spaces in higher ed (see the point above about potential methods that are protective). But we should be clear about what is and is not going on here.

The problem is larger than the technology- and that technology, and the companies that created it and market it to students and our institutions capitalizes on decades long de-valuing of higher ed, and especially humanities work, this devaluation involves more than just technological advancements like LLMs. As those if us in higher ed know, that devaluing has happened at many levels. We can think here of the long drumbeat of claims that higher ed should be about vocational training and since the humanistic disciplines do not create ‘value’ or ‘return on investment’ for students the same way the STEM disciplines do, the humanities are made out to be useless, or add-ons, or part of basic requirements for students giving not much more than lip-service to the concept of a well-rounded liberal education. This devaluing and defunding is both internal and external to the university system- the humanities have been underfunded and adjunctified and administrators and university boards of trustees—the same folks who are also cheerleading the “AI revolution” are part and parcel of this process. And all of this makes it hard in many corners of the academy to employ pedagogies that might be protective against AI encroachment- if you are teaching at multiple institutions to make ends meet and have large class sizes, the idea that you can do the kind of educative work mentioned above is a joke.

The message to our students (and to many of us, frankly) from all of this is loud and clear- yes you may have to take a few courses that require you to think humanistically and to do some writing, but the university does not really care about those- and the larger society thinks they are valueless also, so you should not care that much about those classes either, and look! we now have a way for you to automate you work in those classes. It seems to me that university administrators are doing very little to counter these issues. These are the conditions we find ourselves in.

There has long been blood in the water and AI companies and AI-captured university administrators smell it.

AI companies are shoving the technology into universities and other academic spaces as one of many guaranteed revenue streams because they need all the revenue they can get- they keep burning through money and their products keep getting worse in ways that even the companies themselves do not understand.

This is what we should fight tooth and nail- we should fight the companies that are doing this and the administrators who are buying into it. And we should do this in as far as possible not by seeing our students as the enemy as many in the media fantasize that we do (or that we should) we should enlist them in this fight- teach them about AI, not how to use it, but what it means for society, the conditions of their education, and the ways that AI technologies are simply part of the larger process of not only de-valuing education, but de-valuing them as learners and tuning them into mere consumers of that education rather than the whole persons that they are and that we want them to be.

Maybe AI technologies are useful in some small subset of worklife spaces- I am not qualified to say much about that- but it they not universally useful. And they certainly do nothing useful for teaching and learning broadly.

But we should not blame our students. They are not the real problem here and we cannot let the forces trying to push us to do that win.

My Comments from the 4/17/25 Hands Off Higher Ed teach-in on my campus

Thanks to the organizers of this rally on campus today. It is good to be in community with you all. I wish it were under better circumstances.

I am teaching my Global Justice course currently. This course is in many ways my historic favorite course to teach- it pulls on all areas that I am interested in as a philosopher who specializes in social and political philosophy, critical theory, and global studies. It centers questions of justice- what it is (or how folks have thought about justice as a theoretical and practical matter) and how to achieve it at local, national, and global scales given the interconnectedness of the world at this moment in history, threats to justice like global economic and labor inequality, health inequalities, climate change, war and genocide, and other forms of, as philosopher Olúfęmi Táíwò likes to put the point, “historically accumulated advantage and disadvantage on a global scale” across the globe as a result of colonial histories and their reverberation in the present etc.

I want to filter my comments today through my experience of this course right now as I think it provides a good framing for the importance of higher education broadly, the difficulties we are facing as a community in higher ed, and reasons we should defend the good parts of the system of colleges and universities from the revanchist attacks on it by the current administration through attempts to bully our institutions into alignment with their worldview.

I said a minute ago that that the global justice course is my historic favorite course to teach- currently, it has both taken on more urgency and it has become more difficult. More than once throughout the course this term students have asked me some version of this question:

“Prof. Pfeifer, why study all these different theories of global justice and how they ask us to attempt to respond to injustices in the world when all around us are just power-politics- those in power currently do not care about justice on a global scale, they care about something else- securing power for themselves and those who they see as their ‘tribe’, at the expense of the rest of the world.”

This of course is hard to respond to- these students are not wrong- it has maybe been surprising to many how seemingly quickly we’ve moved from some promise that things might be getting better more broadly in terms of justice to what feels like an almost total collapse of that view, but also I think we need to reckon with the ideology of that kind of view and with the fact that it pulls on the recognition that things have actually not been getting better.

These students have, along with the rest of us, watched power politics play out in their lives for a long time: They (and we) have watched governments do very little about runaway climate change that threatens the future of their lives and a basic level, during the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, they (and we) watched as the authorities called on riot police to quell them and at the same time, they (and we ) have seen the rise of new neo-Nazi organizations such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Front (among others) and their comfort in walking the streets in ways that might have been unthinkable in the relatively recent past. And in the last year they (and we) watched as campuses and government officials take authoritarian stances, calling in riot police again in response to encampments students set up around the country asking for justice for Gaza and imagine a better world, and more recently, they are watching this administration double down on these trends- attempting to erase even minimal progress toward a more just world across a whole host of institutions and structures. They (and we) see rightwing authoritarian power politics all around.

I too have found the global justice class difficult in the current context for much the same reason as my students. But for me, that is longer standing. The kinds of injustices they are experiencing have been around for a long time. The course is and has always been an opportunity to grapple with these and related problems. To help us see them and their history, to be able to ask those questions, to understand the scale of global inequalities and injustices, and to see how some have and are working to remedy those even in the context of rising authoritarianism in which we find ourselves. This course and others like it also provide a space for both analysis of how and why those regimes of power are rearing their ugly heads right now and how to combat them. This is the benefit of this course for me, for our students, and for those who work in this space, both in their academic lives and in other professions.

At its best, the university is a uniquely democratic institution- it allows people and communities the opportunity to puzzle through such problems in a variety of ways, to understand their histories and foundations, and to find ways of working to remedy them- at both small and large scales. And the university, with all of its warts (and there are plenty- we certainly still have a lot of work to do as a community to continue making our universities institutions more democratic) is worth defending because of this promise.

This is also, of course, the reason the current administration wants to discipline and control the university- it wants to shut down any inquiry that might challenge its raw power.

They are afraid of it. They are afraid of what the university can and does do. They know they are weak in the face of a public that is educated, that knows it history and its present, and that has the skill and ability to put that knowledge to work.

Students come to university, many of them, as young adults away from home for the first time and really begin to live in a cosmopolitan space around others who are often different from them- from different places in the country and around the world, who have different backgrounds, beliefs, and traditions, and they get to know others in these environments—and others get to know them—in ways that they sometimes are unable to in their home communities. Ways that help them see the importance of that diversity in all the ways that it expresses itself- these spaces, at their best are generative of all kinds of social and public goods. They generate connection across difference, intellectual curiosity, and—again, at their best—allow students and faculty alike, as philosopher and political theorist Elizabeth Anderson has put the point, to ‘launder’ their beliefs through research, teaching, discussion, and democratic inquiry.

Such laundering happens in university environments, as everyone at this rally today knows, because students learn many things in their time moving through university curriculums and in this, they begin the process of finding themselves and find themselves different than before- sometimes students deepening interests they come to the university with, other times finding new interests that captivate them and turn their attention. All of it broadening their worldviews and ideas in ways that are so very important (the humanities and my discipline, philosophy, are integral to this). University life also connects students to mentors and research showing them tangible ways that they can contribute to the betterment of both themselves and society. These opportunities should be expanded to as many people as possible- not shrunk by an administration that is afraid of knowledge and an informed public, or that only wants people to think one way, to know history and society as they see it.

The current administration might call this “indoctrination”- but again, that is only because they are scared of what such intellectual and communal inquiry means for their control of society. That old adage that ‘knowledge is power’ is true- but only if that knowledge is put to work to change things for the better. And universities, again, at their best, offer this opportunity.

The research that happens on university campuses is also very important for society in many ways, as we know, much of the basic science, medical, technological, social, environmental, and theoretical research that university researchers do cannot be replicated elsewhere- private industry driven research is guided by profit in ways basic research at universities is not (or at least not completely)- and that basic research is necessary for the kinds of industry, and social advances in those fields mentioned above and those advances have obvious benefit to wider society in a variety of ways from the production of vaccines and therapeutics for disease, to advancements in things like green energy technologies, to understanding social processes and systems in ways that help people and correct the kind of accumulated advantage and disadvantage I mentioned earlier.

The freedom—what we call academic freedom—to work on these projects and topics is essential to society and must be defended.

We know that more and more, some of that research on our campuses is being captured by certain industries as they offer funding that supports their goals. This is also why funding from places like the NIH, NSF, and the NEH are so vital- those funding sources are (or at least have historically been) less captured by industry and profit and offer continuing opportunity to produce knowledge for knowledge’s sake. And again, this is why the current administration is trying to shut down those funding sources- it is not about saving money as they claim, but about subordinating research activities to a particular agenda.

Returning now to my class this term and to my own discipline, philosophers and other theorists have argued for a very long time that the hallmark of a free society, is one in which inquiry across academic and intellectual domains is free from coercion. Immanuel Kant argued, in 1784, in the middle of the enlightenment that the main requirement for an enlightened society is the ability to engage in such inquiry- and to do so publicly. This, he thought, fosters the development of reason and rationality across a society in a way that can lead to its betterment.

Olúfęmi Táíwò, while not a Kantian, would agree with this kind of sentiment but also add that such free inquiry is both necessary and cannot be limited to a small select few in an individual institution, nation, or country- that we need to instead remake the world so that those opportunities are made possible for all- one in which we redirect the historic flows of accumulated advantage away from the few and in ways that allow for such inquiry—and action based on that inquiry—to happen across society both here in our communities and also more globally. And colleges and universities, at their best- work as a means of this kind of expansion of opportunity and also the research that goes on in these institutions- whether in history, theory, literature, art, culture, or in the hard sciences, or in engineering, also supports this- these things—again, when they are at their best—can and do make the world better and more just and those opportunities need to be defended by all of us who make common cause and they need to be expanded beyond the walls of the university in ways that open those opportunities to all. We need to keep that possibility alive, work toward it, and keep our universities out of the hands of authoritarians who would bend them to their narrow interest.

Thanks again all and Solidarity.

Triumph of the Vectoralists?: on McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead, Is This Something Worse? And the present moment.

As we have watched the early days of return to the rightwing presidency of Trump, I cannot help but think about McKenzie Wark’s 2019 Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse (Verso). I have found the arguments in her book compelling for a while now, but it seems to me we are starting to see even more clearly—and in real time—the necessity of such analyses.

The Trump administration is seeking more power for the executive branch along two interrelated trajectories. First in the more normal or normalized process of ruling by decree (or executive order) which many have been critiquing, rightly in my view, along the lines of pointing out that with a super slim majority in congress, this is both the safest route for Trump to try to set policy (as he knows that many of the agenda items in the executive orders would split that slim majority and make it hard to set such policy through congressional legislation) and also arguing that it this trajectory is a sign of weakness because of that. The second trajectory is through the use of the unelected techbro billionaire Elon Musk and the apparatus of technological control of government information systems.

It is the second trajectory that both seems new and the thing I want to think with Wark about here.

Trump has, as we know well now, given Elon Musk presidential-like power to set and enact policy in a different way. He has given him unfettered access to governmental data and digital information systems that do everything from initiate payments to people and organizations, organizing financial priorities of various government offices (set largely by congress and outside of the political control of the executive branch) to holding the personal and financial information of all Americans. Musk and his young techbro cronies have barged into multiple federal agencies over the last number of weeks and stolen information by installing hard drives in these offices and by some accounts, they have begun feeding that data to AI systems. This is where Wark’s analysis is important.

In Capital is Dead, she argues that with the emergence of information technology, we are seeing, or have seen, a new mode of production come on the scene as a new site of power and social relation. Information, she argues in the introduction to that book is a “pervasive organizing force” and that information technologies “instrumentalize information” in ways that reorient power and control (5). Such technologies are, as Wark points out here, “specific kinds of apparatus that gather, sort, manage, and process information so that it can then be used to control other things in the world” (ibid). And further, the rise of these kinds of technologies have both made information inexpensive and widely available which in turn, has given:

“…rise to a strange kind of political economy, one based not only on the scarcity of things but also on the excess of information. This has generated a quite novel kinds of problems for those who had (or aspire to) power: how to maintain forms of class inequality, oppression, domination, and exploitation, based on something that in principle is now ridiculously abundant” (ibid.).

It is this analysis that leads Wark to argue that, as she puts it, “the dominant ruling class of our time owns and controls information.” This ruling class is termed the “vectoralist class” as it aims to control the vectors along which information travels along with the information itself.

This is the part that seems most salient right now- with Musk and his fake office that has been made real by the power given to it by the more traditional power of the office of the president and its administration, we are witnessing an acceleration and a broadening of the power of the vectoral class (which he represents along with other billionaire techbros like Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman). The vectoral class has now been given even more access to information and its manipulation for the vectoralists’ own ends and to maintain and extend their class domination.

I have some doubts that even the trump administration knows what they’ve done here by allowing those folks this kind of access. And it is difficult to see a way out. Even if the recent court wins against this information takeover hold up- we’ve now seen vectoral power move into new places and attempt to capture new parts of the political and economic apparatus of our times.

As Wark says early in the book, “to the vector the spoils” indeed (11).

Automobility, Authoritarianism and Climate Politics

Much has been written of late about the causes of our new authoritarian moment. In many corners of the academy—including some of my own recent work (here, here, and here)—the consensus is that one of the main causes is the alienation and economic degradation of neoliberal capital. I think this is basically a correct reading of things overall but sometimes it is lacking in helping us understand all the ways we see authoritarian movements expressing themselves in relation to a variety of movements and political and social issues. It also is not always super helpful in allowing us to see the ways that authoritarian politics can express themselves even in folks who claim more liberal or progressive values. This involves understanding, at a more micro-level the ways authoritarian subjects and affects are produced and reproduced by other material formations and institutions. These are more proximate than economic and policy structures found in neoliberalism as a political ideology and set of policies but they also have authoritarian interpellative effects on individuals.

I have recently been thinking about this more micro-level process in the realm of climate politics and more specifically around the problem of GHG emissions from our transportation systems and the reaction to ways folks who work on this both in a research capacity and a policy capacity are trying to reimagine those systems and move us away from the structure of the personal, fossil fuel powered, automobile. I think that the backlash to policy and advocacy for less cars (or less fossil fuel driven cars) is an example of one of the ways authoritarian politics creeps into our everyday lives and does so in ways that effect all of us.

I think Althusser, Deleuze, and Guattari are useful in helping understand this theoretically as they all give us ample tools for understanding the ways that our own identities and affective lives are conditioned by the larger social world that pre-exists us as individuals and plays a determining role in those identities and affects.

This is new(ish) work for me and I have just started putting some of it out into the academic public in hopes of getting some feedback and moving this work forward as a part of a larger project linking some of the more standard work on neoliberalism and authoritarianism that I and others have been engaged in to thinking this in more micro-level examples.

I gave a talk last week on some of this for the CSU Fresno Ethics Center’s speaker series. Here is a link to the recording of that talk (and thanks to Andy Fiala and other folks at the center for the invitation along with folks who attended):