Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Really enjoyed this fantastic piece by Sonja Drimmer and Christopher Nygren:
https://www.publicbooks.org/four-frictions-or-how-to-resist-ai-in-education/
Here are few favorite pull quotes of mine + one little quibble at the end:
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"It is in this context that we must consider the newfound praise of AI in education. AI boosters promise that the technology will find greater efficiencies in education; but this is less about the functionalities of AI itself, and far more about eviscerating the public nature of public education."
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"This conception of education is antithetical to the transactional and antihuman program of “optimized” and “efficient” delivery of learning outcomes, promised by proponents of AI’s incursion into the space of education."
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"We hope that other educators will join us in helping students and professors to pave an exit ramp off the alienating highway of automated education, and we aspire to achieve this in community, rather than as solitary prompt engineers."
That last point, about learning in community, really resonates with me. It connects with what I say in this piece for UNESCO:
https://www.youtube.com/live/l-OWi6VoMng?t=4250s
(Written version available here, pp.41-45: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000395236 )
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Digital Learning Week 2025
And what MJ Crockett says here about studies in cognitive science missing a lot (specifically, in their case around thick empathy, but it applies in education too) by focusing on empathy (resp. education) as something that happens in individual minds.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5862422
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Okay, now for the little quibble. Drimmer and Nygren begin their piece by taking us to an historical example of resistance to the use of computing resources for military purposes.
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They then contrast that to the present moment, saying:
"And this, in turn, made the potential targets of resistance clear; indeed, it was relatively easy to organize protests in front of large mainframe computers, located in very specific facilities and locations. Now, however, computation is distributed. And this makes the targets to resist so diffuse that the shape of direct action becomes difficult even to conceptualize."
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In fact, the computation is (again) highly concentrated, but off-campus, in the form of data centers, especially hyperscale data centers. And these are important locations of resistance --- especially the folks organizing to prevent their construction.
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None of this invalidates Drimmer & Nygren's points, and indeed we need both the friction and person-to-person work they recommend on campus AND organized resistance to data center construction.
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Anyway, read the whole essay. It's truly excellent.
https://www.publicbooks.org/four-frictions-or-how-to-resist-ai-in-education/
Sasha 
@emilymbender An example from my experience: I know a remarkable early career engineer who told me that he stopped using AI coding helper tools. Because they served a solution that maybe worked or didn't work. But it was served, not understood.
And he concluded with: "I didn't learn anything. This isn't progress."
And he concluded with: "I didn't learn anything. This isn't progress."
Ben Fulton@emilymbender I think they nailed the issue of "transactional and antihuman program of “optimized” and “efficient” delivery of learning outcomes"...but that isn't due to AI; it's due to the assembly line nature of education today. Grade, evaluate, and possibly award the bit of paper that gets the slightly better job. AI disrupts that, and that might not be such a bad thing.
@benfulton I get the feeling you didn't read the article I linked to, because they do address the myth/attitude
"that public expenditure on education was a wasteful extravagance" ... but more to the point, if you see "AI"-based "disruption" as somehow good here, what do you mean by "AI" and what is your theory of change?
"that public expenditure on education was a wasteful extravagance" ... but more to the point, if you see "AI"-based "disruption" as somehow good here, what do you mean by "AI" and what is your theory of change?
@emilymbender I don't see it as good, but I do see it as disruption. Drimmer/Nygren focus on the Platonic ideal of education, so they suggest that as a result of AI "students will be subjected to brutal calculations to determine their worthiness for job interviews" rather than acknowledging that that is what is happening *now*. For better or for worse, AI clearly makes it more difficult to perform these brutal calculations.
@benfulton "AI" is all about datafication and brutal calculations.
@emilymbender If teachers use AI for grading and evaluation, perhaps. I don't see it when students use it for writing essays.
Joe Pallas@emilymbender Their point may be that the data centers’ customers are themselves diffuse. No one is building a “higher-ed data center,” so people who oppose using LLMs in education but aren’t (yet) seeing the broader societal harms won’t see data centers that serve a multitude of customers as a location of resistance *for education*.
Stay 'splainy Mastodon.
Meanwhile:
https://bsky.app/profile/sonjadrimmer.bsky.social/post/3mahl6i72e223
