An open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt GenAI in education

[usonian]

https://openletter.earth/an-open-letter-from-educators-who-refuse-the-call-to-adopt-genai-in-education-cb4aee75

We are a global community of education professionals who refuse the call for generative AI (GenAI) adoption in schools and colleges, and reject the narrative of its inevitability.

At its heart, education is a project of guiding learners to exercise their own agency in the world. Through education, learners should be empowered to participate meaningfully in society, industry, and the planet. But in its current form, GenAI is corrosive to the agency of students, educators and professionals.

Current GenAI technologies represent unacceptable legal, ethical and environmental harms, including exploitative labour, piracy of countless creators' and artists' work, harmful biases, mass production of misinformation, and reversal of the global emissions reduction trajectory.

GenAI is a threat to student learning and wellbeing. There is insufficient evidence for student use of GenAI to support genuine learning gains, though there is a massive marketing push to position these products as essential to students’ future livelihoods. Young people using anthropomorphised chatbots are vulnerable to psychological and emotional addiction. GenAI "relationships" continue to trigger mental health crises, human relationship breakdowns, and in the worst cases, attempted and completed suicides.

Further, GenAI adoption in industry is overwhelmingly aimed at automating and replacing human effort, often with the expectation that future “AGI” will render human intellectual and creative labor obsolete. This is a narrative we will not participate in.

We do not support the use of GenAI in education. We pledge to uphold the following commitments in our education work, and call on educational institutions, school leaders and policymakers to honor our right to enact them.

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.

You may sign at the site.
253 verified signatures as I post this.
Posting in entirety, as it's an open letter.
As in open.

[msongs]

1. teens love AI cuz it's a shiny new toy. when they are all unemployed by age 30 they may change their minds lol nt

[usonian]

2. Did anyone notice a shortage of "let me think this through" in this country?

FAFO's the rule, gaining ground yet.

FAFO seems to be AI's traveling partner.

As in "Don't make me think."

McDonald’s AI Hiring Bot With Password ‘123456’ Leaks Millions of Job-Seekers Data
https://cybersecuritynews.com/mcdonalds-ai-hiring-bot-leaks/

OH, I THOUGHT THINKING WAS THE COMPUTER'S JOB, NOT MINE.

[GPV]

3. Thanks! Signed by this educator!

[highplainsdem]

4. Great letter, and an incredibly important cause! K&R, and thanks for posting this, usonian!

[anciano]

5. GenAI is now an established and defining

technology of our time. Choosing whether or not to use it is no different from deciding whether or not to use the Internet.

[usonian]

6. The internet replaces dictionaries and calls to your grocer.

It doesn't replace thinking.

In school, you're supposed to learn how to reason, and that's replaced, IMO.

[anciano]

7. I respect your viewpoint....

but in my personal experience using GenAI, I've found it to be an invaluable tool that, when used appropriately, can enhance reasoning and critical thinking.

[usonian]

8. But you're not a kid. You developed learning and reasoning skills.

Will kids learn them, or push buttons?

You need those skills even more now, to make sense of all the output, or to create useful prompts.

This guy argues that it's like rapid prototyping was in the 80's. Quick to learn how to make something that "just works" but anything complex requires big picture design/architecture/engineering skills, and experience to find the goofs and corner cases. "Watch that next step. It's a Doozy"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524216

Someone said: "It’s not that AI is helping do the work of 10 engineers. It’s that engineers are able to use AI to build better products and explore unknowns easily."

And how do you explore vast unknown space? With learning and reasoning skills and creative imagination.

And how do you develop them when there's always an instant answer with a keypress?

[anciano]

9. Bottom line: GenAI is now an irrevocable part

of modern life, whether one chooses to use it or not.