Dear Universities of The Netherlands, Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences, and Respective Executive Boards,

With this letter we take a principled stand against the proliferation of so-called 'AI' technologies in universities. As an educational institution, we cannot condone the uncritical use of AI by students, faculty, or leadership. We also call for reconsidering any direct financial relationships between Dutch universities and AI companies. The unfettered introduction of AI technology leads to contravention of the spirit of the EU Al act. It undermines our basic pedagogical values and the principles of scientific integrity. It prevents us from maintaining our standards of independence and transparency. And most concerning, AI use has been shown to hinder learning and deskill critical thought.

As academics, and especially as university-level educators, we have the responsibility to educate our students, not to rubber stamp degrees without any relationship to university-level skills. Our duty as educators is the cultivation of critical thinking and intellectual honesty, and it is not our role either to police or promote cheating, nor to normalise our students' and mentees' avoidance of deep thought. Universities are about engaging deeply with the subject matter. The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before. We expect students to be given space and time to form their own deeply considered opinions informed by our expertise and nurtured by our educational spaces. Such spaces must be protected from industry advertising, and our funding must not be misspent on profit-making companies, which offer little in return and actively deskill our students. Even the term 'Artificial Intelligence' itself (which scientifically refers to a field of academic study) is widely misused, with conceptual unclarity coopted to advance industry agendas and undermine scholarly discussions. It is our task to demystify and to challenge 'AI' in our teaching, research and in our engagement with society.

We must protect and cultivate the ecosystem of human knowledge. AI models can mimic the appearance of scholarly work, but they are (by construction) unconcerned with truth—the result is a torrential outpouring of unchecked but convincing-sounding "information". At best, such output is accidentally true, but generally citationless, divorced from human reasoning and the web of scholarship that it steals from. At worst, it is confidently wrong. Both outcomes are dangerous to the ecosystem.

Overhyped 'AI' technologies, such as chatbots, large language models, and related products, are just that: products that the technology industry, just like the tobacco and petroleum industries, pump out for profit and in contradiction to the values of ecological sustainability, human dignity, pedagogical safeguarding, data privacy, scientific integrity, and democracy. These 'AI' products are materially and psychologically detrimental to our students' ability to write and think for themselves, existing instead for the benefit of investors and multinational companies. As a marketing strategy to introduce such tools in the classroom, companies falsely claim that students are lazy or lack writing skills. We condemn those claims and reassert students’ agency vis-à-vis corporate control.

We have been here before with tobacco, petroleum, and many other harmful industries who do not have our interests at heart and who are indifferent to the academic progress of our students and to the integrity of our scholarly processes.

We call upon you to:

• Resist the introduction of AI in our own software systems, from Microsoft to OpenAI to Apple. It is not in our interests to let our processes be corrupted and give away our data to be used to train models that are not only useless to us, but also harmful.

• Ban AI use in the classroom for student assignments, in the same way we ban essay mills and other forms of plagiarism. Students must be protected from de-skilling and allowed space and time to perform their assignments themselves.

• Cease normalising the AI hype and the lies which are prevalent in the technology industry's framing of these technologies. The technologies do not have the advertised capacities and their adoption puts students and academics at risk of violating ethical, legal, scholarly, and scientific standards of reliability, sustainability, and safety.

• Fortify our academic freedom as university staff to enforce these principles and standards in our classrooms and our research as well as on the computer systems we are obliged to use as part of our work. We as academics have the right to our own spaces.

• Sustain critical thinking on AI and promote critical engagement with technology on a firm academic footing. Scholarly discussion must be free from the conflicts of interest caused by industry funding, and reasoned resistance must always be an option.

Yours sincerely,

Olivia Guest, Assistant Professor of Computational Cognitive Science, Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence Department and Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen

Iris van Rooij, Professor of Computational Cognitive Science, Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence Department and Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen

Marcela Suarez Estrada, Lecturer in Critical Intersectional Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, School of Artificial Intelligence, Radboud University Nijmegen

Lucy Avraamidou, Professor of Science Education, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen

Barbara Müller, Associate Professor of Human-Machine Interaction, Faculty of Social Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen

Marjan Smeulders, Researcher Microbiology and teacher ambassador for Teaching and Learning Centre, Faculty of Science, Radboud University Nijmegen

Arnoud Oude Groote Beverborg, Lecturer of Pedagogy, Faculty of Social Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen

Ronald de Haan, Assistant Professor in Theoretical Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam

Mirko Tobias Schäfer, Associate Professor of AI, Data & Society, Faculty of Science, Utrecht University

Mark Dingemanse, Associate Professor & Section leader AI, Language and Communication Technology, Faculty of Arts, Radboud University Nijmegen

Frans-Willem Korsten, Professor in Literature, Culture, and Law, Leiden University for the Arts in Society

Mark Blokpoel, Assistant Professor of Computational Cognitive Science, Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence Department and Donders Center for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen

Juliette Alenda-Demoutiez, Assistant Professor, Economic Theory and Policy, Faculty of Management, Radboud University Nijmegen

Federica Russo, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Techno-Science & Westerdijk Chair, Freudenthal Institute, Utrecht University

Felienne Hermans, Professor in Computer Science Education, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Francien Dechesne, Associate Professor of Ethics and Digital Technologies, eLaw Center for Law and Digital Technologies, Leiden University

Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Professor in Computer Science, Radboud University / Karlstad University.

Jelle van Dijk, Associate Professor Embodied Interaction Design, Faculty of Engineering Technology, University of Twente

Andrea Reyes Elizondo, Researcher & PhD Candidate, Faculties of Social Sciences & Humanities, Leiden University

Djoerd Hiemstra, Professor in Computer Science, Radboud University

Liesbet van Zoonen, Professor of Cultural Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Emily Sandford, Postdoctoral Researcher, Leiden Observatory, Leiden University

M. Birna van Riemsdijk, Associate Professor Intimate Computing, Human-Media Interaction, University of Twente

Maaike Harbers, Professor of Artificial Intelligence & Society, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences

Marieke Peeters, Senior Researcher Responsible Applied Artificial Intelligence and Human-AI Interaction, Research Group on Artificial Intelligence, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht

Marieke Woensdregt, Assistant Professor of Computational Cognitive Science, Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence Department and Donders Center for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen

Edwin van Meerkerk, Professor of Cultural Education, Radboud Institute for Culture and Heritage, Faculty of Arts, Radboud University Nijmegen

Sietske Tacoma, Senior Research Responsible Applied Artificial Intelligence, Research Group on Artificial Intelligence, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht

Nolen Gertz, Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy, Chair of Interdisciplinary Sciences Examination Board, University of Twente

Ileana Camerino, Lecturer of Academic Skills, School of Artificial Intelligence, Radboud University Nijmegen

Annelies Kleinherenbrink, Assistant Professor for Gender and Diversity in AI, Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence Department and Gender & Diversity, Radboud University Nijmegen

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