An open letter from educators who refuse to adopt GenAI in education
Do you feel as I feel about the breathless adoption of generative AI at all levels of education?
Do you worry about the short and long term impacts it might have on students’ skills, knowledge, values, behaviours, relationships and cognitive functioning?
We’re in a dangerous place, and it might already be too late. Schools and universities all over the world are entering massive, multi-year, multi-million dollar deals with AI companies to adopt and promote LLMs. They are forcing educators into arrangements they cannot resist, because speaking up could cost them their jobs, or potentially their careers.
I don’t expect everyone who reads this to be able to put their name to it. But I’m asking you: if you are an education professional who has the resources, the freedom, and the will to support this call, please sign this open letter.
Who is it from?
All those involved in the work of education, anywhere in the world, are welcome and encouraged to contribute: not only teachers, but library staff, career services, research supervisors, academic developers, learning designers, technology support, education quality, school leadership, student support, and of course students.
Who is it to?
It is directed to educational institutions, school leaders and policymakers and calls for their endorsement and support of educators’ right to educate without generative AI.
While the commitment statements — “we will not” — are stated unambiguously, signatories’ capacity to uphold them is dependent on governments and institutions protecting this capacity. We understand that.
Signing doesn’t mean making promises that are outside of your control — but it does mean pledging your support of educators’ autonomy and fundamental freedoms.
An open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt GenAI in education
6 July 2025
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.
This letter addresses the harm AI does to students' ability to think and express themselves and the unethical way in which most of the GenAI tools have been trained; but does not sufficiently emphasise the unreliability of the information proffered by these AI tools, due to hallucination, AI inability to detect errors in transcription or to distinguish facts from jokes when trawling social media, amplification of errors by repetition, etc etc.
Bravo 👏