As the promotion of the collection of technologies known as “Generative artificial intelligence” at the university advances, we oppose its uncritical use for teaching, research, and administration. We insist on a high bar for this critical disposition, and on limits on investment in these technologies as well as on their use.

We desire a university that guides and nurture students as they develop capacities to be thoughtful, creative, and engaged participants in all aspects of life.

We want a university that affirms and celebrates what it is to be human and to be in relationships of respect with humans and non-humans alike. Universities ought to respect the human labour that goes into the co-creation of knowledge and enable students to learn how to think rigorously.

We are committed to a university that values and promotes curiosity, knowledge, learning, and understanding; the university is a place that opens pathways to these difficult but worthwhile virtues.

We defend and uphold the following rights and principles for faculty, staff, and students:

i. The right to have our work NOT be added to datasets used to create and maintain Generative AI through university owned or contracted software and storage

ii. The right to complete our work without the use of Generative AI or its intrusion through suggestions (including options to complete assignments without AI, options of software that does not automatically incorporate Generative AI, and the elimination of suggested summaries of texts provided by University libraries)

iii. The responsibility to disclose all uses of Generative AI in student, faculty, and staff work (from emails to articles and course syllabi, for instance)

iv. The responsibility to protect academic freedom and treat other people’s intellectual work with care, and to shelter it to the best of our awareness from becoming integrated into Generative AI datasets

These rights and responsibilities entail the prohibition of entering student papers, research and ethics proposals, papers for review, or any kind of intellectual property belonging to others into Generative AI applications.

We oppose the uncritical and unnecessary introduction of Generative AI in the university’s academic work because it undermines our work:

• as researchers, by plagiarizing our results for the composition of a textual corpus to reproduce (“training”); decontextualizing our work in its responses to prompts or in summaries; and discouraging consultation by taking over search pages and keeping users engaged and away from the published versions of our work

• as researchers seeking knowledge, by creating an illusion of truth without any concern for it and instead leading to textual approximations, inaccuracies, and falsehoods

• as skilled professionals, by giving shortcuts to subpar versions of what our lifelong practice makes possible, from artworks to software, from blueprints to theory

• as authors, by destroying what integrity was left in academic publishing in completing the process of the commodification of knowledge and finding ways for others to benefit from it – and then selling it back to us through library subscriptions and user accounts for chat bots

• as teachers, by focusing students on output rather than on the process of learning

• as teachers, by making students lose trust in us because of our institution’s subscription to AI-detecting software (which is faulty at best)

• as colleagues, by encouraging artificial reviews of the literature (which invents sources AND results) and peer reviews (which take away creativity in responses and in the work), responding with malpractice to mounting pressure to cite and evaluate ever more widely

Furthermore, its goals and functioning are inconsistent with:

• the pursuit of truth, in that Generative AI only approximates language and produces text according to statistical predictions, making biases, errors, and false claims inevitable

• the pursuit of knowledge, in that Generative AI does not have access to non-digital sources and is therefore incomplete, and does not represent all knowledge systems

• the cultivation of learning and ‘discovery,’ in that the many parts of writing (reading, editing, cross-referencing, development of understanding, translation of knowledge, responding to intentions) prompt critical thinking and independent analysis

• the cultivation of unique and authentic voice, in that the use of Generative AI does not enable originality to develop the understanding and knowledge necessary to have a perspective on one’s own life and field of study and research

• diversity, in that Generative AI replicates and widely disseminates source biases, including biases toward Western knowledge and languages, and does not promote oral, non-Western, and non-digital ways of knowing

• reconciliation, in that Generative AI draws from digitized western knowledges and languages

• reciprocity, in that Generative AI is not based on a mutual relationship of respect with creators, humans, and the environment

• respect for human scales of time, and the time that is required for human forms of acquisition and processing of ideas and information, both in training and in continued development; for the amount of time that careful thinking and training, including the identification and correction of errors, demands of human beings.

As citizens, we oppose the use of Generative AI by the university because of its destructive nature:

• it contributes to the deskilling of the workforce and of university employees

• it counteracts any policy or measure toward sustainability by its destruction of the environment

• it leads to the private appropriation of public, necessary infrastructure, and is raising the cost of the use of power

• it takes water and breathable air away from marginalized communities

• it captures and commodifies creativity and intellectual property

• it subjects what should be public knowledge produced by publicly funded universities to the constant threat of privatization

• its proprietary nature can be used to undermine democracies through the use of algorithms that limit what words can be used to express knowledge

• It is a theft-based knowledge system that steals and appropriates researchers’, artists’, and writers’ original works, findings, and data

We call on everyone working and studying at universities and members of communities who collaborate with universities to sign and circulate this letter. Upon signing, we encourage each signatory to forward it to their administrators and colleagues with a personalized paragraph or message outlining their rejection of Generative AI as well as their demands in relation to their own institution.