Show Notes
Guest, O et al., Zenodo (2025) - Position piece urging universities to resist uncritical adoption of AI technologies such as LLMs and chatbots because they undermine academic freedom, integrity, and pedagogical skills.
Study Highlights:
A co-authored open letter, conceptual analysis, and literature synthesis drawing on historical and contemporary sources. The authors analyse how AI industry marketing, ambiguous jargon, closed-source models, and extractive data and labour practices create institutional dependencies and conflicts of interest. They show this structural entanglement erodes research integrity, deskills students and staff, and produces environmental and social harms. As a functional implication they call for principled refusal, transparency, critical AI literacy, and policy measures to protect academic freedom and the ecosystem of human knowledge.
Conclusion:
Universities must reject the uncritical adoption of AI technologies and take active measures to safeguard critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity.
Music:
Enjoy the music based on this article at the end of the episode.
Reference: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. (2025)
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17065099
License:
CC BY 4.0
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Episode link: https://basebybase.castos.com/episodes/universities-resist-ai-adoption
