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.

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