DoomsdaysCWOberlin #Luddites Reject "Year of #AI Exploration" Adopted by School
September 19, 2025
To President Carmen Twillie Ambar and Oberlin Community:
We are drafting this letter to you on a typewriter that is over 70 years old; this is a machine that we know well. With it, we ditch the crutches of spell-check and generative AI, and we think intently about every phrase we pound out. As we force ourselves, for once, to slow down, we engage in an inner dialogue.
Most of us did not enroll at Oberlin in search of superficial perfection, nor of lazy convenience. Rather, we chose it for its quirky individualism and a tangible education — the challenging of our young minds’ potential, not the chasing of institutional “gold-star” approval.
This college, which was built on a legacy of learning and labor, now risks straying from these principles. With ChatGPT at the helm, our emails, essays, and discussion posts will be generated for us. Not by us. And let’s not fool ourselves. This is precisely what these platforms will be used for.
You claim that this year will be one of “experimentation,” not adoption. But even one semester of accepted (even encouraged) chat-bot use will jettison our student body down a lazy, irredeemable tunnel of intellectual destruction.
We see this fetish for efficiency in other ways at this college: in the takeover of our beloved library cafe by a “bookstore” with no books in stock and an app replacing customer service — through automated instead of hand-pulled coffee.
Who gains from this if not the students? Sam Altman of ChatGPT and Sundar Pichai of Gemini may be plying their wares to colleges at low or no cost, but it’s no secret that every engagement with these platforms is an effort in surveillance in which our data is extracted and monetized. President Ambar, as you embark on your year of AI, we’ll embark on our own year of self-actualization — of realizing the fruits of our labor, and of embracing human imperfection and raw inquiry. We reject information technologies operating out of data centers that guzzle water and precious energy sources (and that contradict our campus’ carbon-neutral policy). We will not stand by and witness the further atrophying of our liberal arts education. Rather than strengthening Silicon Valley, we build our own skills and generative sweat. We urge all members of the Oberlin community who feel similarly to join us and sign our “AI-Opt-Out Letter.”
As for you, President Ambar, we ask that you terminate the College’s contract with Google Gemini and OpenAI. Our position may risk disapproval, perceived backwardness, and the outward appearance of naiveté. But let us not ask what the Silicon Valley oligarchs can do for Oberlin students, but what Oberlin students can do for ourselves while we still have the brain capacity to do so.
–The Oberlin Luddite Club
Charlie Mclaughlin, Logan Lane, Mary Claire McGreivey, Simon Puchner-Noel, Marlowe Blantz, and Sawyer Van Dyck
Bupu
Davva
Wess Daniels
No oficial