We are a global community of education professionals who refuse the call for generative AI (GenAI) adoption in schools and colleges, and reject the narrative of its inevitability.
At its heart, education is a project of guiding learners to exercise their own agency in the world. Through education, learners should be empowered to participate meaningfully in society, industry, and the planet. But in its current form, GenAI is corrosive to the agency of students, educators and professionals.
Current GenAI technologies represent unacceptable legal, ethical and environmental harms, including exploitative labour, piracy of countless creators' and artists' work, harmful biases, mass production of misinformation, and reversal of the global emissions reduction trajectory.
GenAI is a threat to student learning and wellbeing. There is insufficient evidence for student use of GenAI to support genuine learning gains, though there is a massive marketing push to position these products as essential to students’ future livelihoods. Young people using anthropomorphised chatbots are vulnerable to psychological and emotional addiction. GenAI "relationships" continue to trigger mental health crises, human relationship breakdowns, and in the worst cases, attempted and completed suicides.
Further, GenAI adoption in industry is overwhelmingly aimed at automating and replacing human effort, often with the expectation that future “AGI” will render human intellectual and creative labor obsolete. This is a narrative we will not participate in.
We do not support the use of GenAI in education. We pledge to uphold the following commitments in our education work, and call on educational institutions, school leaders and policymakers to honor our right to enact them.
1 — We will not use GenAI to mark or provide feedback on student work, nor to design any part of our courses.
2 — We will not promote institutional GenAI products built on unethically-developed foundation models like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grok or Llama. We will not allow corporate-institutional partnerships to compromise our academic freedom.
3 — We will not accept without evidence the sales agenda of people who are not educators, nor will we spread hype at the expense of student learning and vibrant pedagogy.
4 — We will not train our students to use generative AI tools to replace their own intellectual effort and development. We cannot endorse the automation and exploitation of intellectual and creative labor.
5 — We will not ask students or staff to violate the spirit of academic integrity by promoting the use of unethical products.
6 — We will not rewrite curriculum to insert generative AI into it for the purposes of "scaffolding AI literacy".
7 — We will not contribute to the erosion of academic freedom and educator agency by forcing educators into compliance with technology they find unethical.
8 — We honor students' rights to resist and refuse as well.
- Melanie Dusseau, Associate Professor of English, The University of Findlay, Findlay
- Miriam Reynoldson, Teaching academic, learning designer and postgraduate student, RMIT University, Melbourne
- Elisa Bone, Lecturer, Educational Futures, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
- Chris Miciek, Director, Career Development, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia
- Matt Kurowski, Program manager, RMIT, Melbourne
- Mat Osmond, Senior Lecturer, Falmouth University, School of Art, Falmouth, Cornwall
- Graham Lovelace, School governor
- Vicki J. Sapp, Professor/Instructor of English, Durham Technical Community College, Durham, NC
- James Stacey Taylor, Professor, TCNJ, Ewing
- Tamsin Haggis, Ex-Higher Education lecturer, Previously University of Stirling, Scotland, Edinburgh
- Nicole Dittmer, Professor, Delaware Valley University, Doylestown
- Lincoln Konkle, professor, The College of New Jersey, Ewing
- Lydia Watson, Educational Developer, Capilano University, Sechelt
- MICHAEL ISRAEL, Associate Professor of English Language, English Dept, University of Maryland, Silver Spring
- Helen Choi, Senior Lecturer, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
- Alexandra Ciaffaglione, Lecturer, RMIT University, Melbourne
- Kate Wiedemann, Secondary Teacher, Teacher at Independent Educational Organisation, Brisbane, Brisbane
- Tom Mahoney, Teacher and education researcher, Deakin University, Melbourne
- Vicky Nagy, Senior Lecturer, University Of Tasmania, Hobart
- Sarah-Jane Botham, Registered Teacher, K-12, Queensland Department of Education, Brisbane
765 more
verified signatures
- Kate Douglas, Professor of English, Flinders University, Adelaide
- Brigid Coombe AM, Nurse Academic, Flinders University, Westbourne Park
- Sharyn Roach Anleu, Academic, Flinders University, Adelaide
- Douglas B. Sponsler, teacher, Boys' Latin of Philadelphia Charter School, Philadelphia
- Ana Sofia Bruzon, PhD Candidate, Macquarie University, Sydney
- Emanuela moretto, Tutor, UTS, Sydney
- Donald McClintock, Retired, City Ethics Inc., JACKSONVILLE
- David Ronan, Engineer, Lisk Ireland Ltd, Galway
- Aspa Paltoglou, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, UK, Manchester
- Gregory Frost-Arnold, Professor, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, US
- maurizio lana, professore associato di scienza della biblioteca, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli
- Colm O'Neill, Lecturer, South East Technological University, Ireland, Carlow, Ireland
- W, David Stahlman, Professor of Psychological Science, University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA
- Rob, Lecturer, Flinders, Adelaide
- Thorsten Busch, Senior Lecturer, ZHAW School of Management and Law, Zurich
- Cara Marta Messina, Assistant Professor of English, Marist University, Poughkeepsie
- Georgia Sains, Doctoral Teaching Associate, University of Bristol, Bristol
- Angie Tran, Professor of Political Economy/Global Studies, California State University, Monterey Bay, Marina
- Andrew McMurry, Professor, University of Waterloo, Waterloo
- Professor Guido Noto La Diega, Law Professor, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
and sign it together