Make the University an AI-Free Zone

In an op-ed published in the University Post on September 24, Associate Professor Frederik Hjorth criticizes a number of previous articles in the same newspaper that oppose UCPH management’s new AI policy.

To do so, Hjorth deploys a commonly known AI inevitability discourse, including the notion that if we don’t get on board with AI, we will be left behind, that there are ways to use AI ethically, that AI increases productivity and that AI is here to stay.

This discourse is also espoused by the recently appointed vice prorector for AI, and it has become so ubiquitous there are now even bingo cards circulating online, illustrating its various components.

Beyond the rhetorics of the article, what is most interesting to me is the notion of ‘AI-free zones’ that Hjorth introduces. He argues that »a university that insists on being an AI-free zone risks providing worse research and teaching.« But isn’t the university already an AI-free zone? Isn’t it already an institution fundamentally antithetical to AI?

Now, I don’t mean the university as it currently exists, after decades of managerial corporatization, hyper-digitalisation and widespread precarity. Of course, the University of Copenhagen today is anything but an AI-free zone, with management pushing genAI use and other algorithmic practices to its employees and students on an almost daily basis. What I mean is the university ideal: what we think about when we imagine what a university should be, or what we might aspire it to be.

AI produces cognitive subjugation and undermines communities

While AI relies on the massive theft of literally every form of human knowledge and artistic creation, the university is supposed to be a place that supports the creative generation of new ideas, that allows us to connect disparate spheres of knowledge and respectfully build from them through careful observation, dialogue and rigor – rather than mere plagiarism.

 

While AI erodes communities, promotes thoughtlessness and replaces true connections with simulations, the university is a space of relationship-building.

While AI erodes communities, promotes thoughtlessness and replaces true connections with simulations, the university is a space of relationship-building.

While AI operates as an engine of algorithmic homogenization, the university is meant to break boundaries, to defy narrowly-defined structures of thought, and reach new horizons of understanding that enable us to positively intervene in the world.

While AI produces cognitive surrender and mental automation, the university is a place that can foster critical thinking, posing difficult problems to us, and encouraging us to painstakingly work through them using our own minds – a fundamental condition for learning.

While the use of AI leads to de-skilling and never-skilling, the university is meant to be a place where teachers can help students to hone their skills and acquire new ones, to train both their minds and bodies to approach the many complex challenges they will face throughout their lives.

While AI erodes communities, promotes thoughtlessness and replaces true connections with simulations, the university is a space of relationship-building. It is the central place where students find themselves as young, independent adults, forging bonds of friendship and mentorship that might last a lifetime.

While AI relies on massive land, water and energy grabs, as well as the acceleration of climate breakdown and the exploitation of millions of workers (from child slave miners in Congo to traumatized content moderators and suicide-prompters in Kenya, Lebanon and Nigeria, paid less than 2 dollars an hour), the university is supposed to be an institution of emancipation; it is supposed to give us the tools to create freer, more sustainable, more democratic and more convivial worlds in which we can actually live the lives we want to live.

Many of us reject the logic of the machine

Our management is currently earmarking a large number of articles and substantial sums of money to promote the use of AI. This creates an opportunity to reflect on management itself; on managerial structures as algorithmically imposed top-down rules that obstruct democratic decision-making processes; as structures that shape the university into a corporation and a market-based institution designed for the profit of a few, rather than for the well-being and welfare of its students, its workers and broader society.

Perhaps it is also an opportunity to start questioning why our university is not an AI-free zone today, and why it has so eagerly chosen to bow down to the new techno-fascist wave, even going so far as to help fund an AI company dedicated to supporting and enabling mass surveillance, massacres of children and genocide.

Finally, it might be an opportunity to work towards actually making our university an AI-free zone. A place that brings learning, creativity, critical thinking and community-building to life, rather than ruthless productivity, efficiency, homogeneity and violence.

After all, there are many students, lecturers and researchers within the university who already reject the logic of the machine. It is just a matter of joining hands and working together.