We have been here before, both with entanglements of AI and statistics with industry corrupting our academic processes, and with so-called AI summers: hype cycles that pivot from funding booms to complete busts and cessation of research [...]
The foreseeable AI winter will take with it entire curricula, academic processes and practices, and educators’ and learners’ livelihoods. [...]
There is circular reasoning at play when we suggest and assume machines can think, reason, or argue like humans can, and therefore, treat them — and test them — like humans. [...]
The only argument from ignorance that science permits is caution, more research, and care as appropriate actions when something is truly unknown. [...]
Teaching about AI technologies should be just like how we teach ‘no smoking’ or the causal links between lung cancer and cigarette smoke; yet, we do not teach students how to roll cigarettes and smoke them. [...]
In thinking about implications for the design of learning environments and curriculum design, we first need to pause and think about what we really would like AI tools to do, or, put differently, what might be the added value of the use of AI tools in education — if any? [...]
AI users, on the other hand, are customers much more like the person buying the end product of woodwork than carpenters themselves. [...]
[W]ith the proliferation of AI products and their uncritical adoption in academia, we become unable to help younger generations of scholars in learning to uphold and to appreciate scientific integrity. As a result, we will be deskilling the whole academic profession, a direct threat to the ecosystem of human knowledge.
Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., van Meerkerk, E., Oude Groote Beverborg, A., de Haan, R., Reyes Elizondo, A., Blokpoel, M., Scharfenberg, N., Kleinherenbrink, A., Camerino, I., Woensdregt, M., Monett, D., Brown, J., Avraamidou, L., Alenda-Demoutiez, J., Hermans, F., & van Rooij, I. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17065099