We all sat down, waiting for the slides to be ready so they could show us how to «enhance teaching and learning» through AI, “boost engagement” and “integrate it ethically”. Whose ethics, I wondered? They didn’t say.
First slide: they present to us the numbers of a recent study on water usage. Acknowledgement follows: it uses humongous amounts of water! A very bad thing.
Next slide: “Well, and these are the ways you can leverage its potential for…”
It now seems to have become standard. A kind of ‘acknowledgement fetichism’, numbers piled on numbers to demonstrate the speaker’s or institutional awareness of the problem. ‘There is your table, your pie chart. Now let me move on to the part where we all agree our hands are tied and our most cherished goal is saving time to produce more.’ The part where we claim to care for the planet while plundering the very ecology of language itself—its gratuitous nature and creative wealth—in favor of regurgitation, in praise of the globalizing language of efficiency and maximization, the plunder thanks to which our students have to think less. Two birds with one algorithm.
They took no questions. No talk about ideas followed. Certain disciplines seem to think they can run away with failing to discuss the social patterns and the historic mission from which all “technics” are inseparable.
But… they made their “green” acknowledgement, like a copy-pasted land acknowledgement in en email signature or Starbucks giving a few cents of each purchase to fighting poverty in Africa.
We stood up. So many of us feeling we had, we have, no choice. Apparently conversations about consent do not apply here. Another global success story.
*Picture: the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro at a screening of his new Frankenstein film.
Del Toro’s ‘F**ck AI’ video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DP908dAEgah/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet
Territorio de ideas 