The acceptance of AI by the ‘ChatvB’ contradicts everything this university stands for

Professor of Social Theory Willem Schinkel draws on a previously ignored Erasmian value to explain why, in his view, the Executive Board's use of 'AI' (in quotation marks) is far from innocent.

Surely I am naive to be shocked by EM’s revealing that the Executive Board (CvB) regularly uses ‘AI’ to write its speeches. Well, I choose naivety, and I deploy a truly ‘Erasmian value’ here, the one the CvB has thus far completely ignored in its promotion of such values: mockery.

The members of the ‘ChatvB’ (or ‘ClaudevB’, the ‘CvBrainless’, ‘Executive Bot’… take your pick), have for years fed ‘AI’-paranoia. They have rendered it next to impossible for us to ask students to write, as this paranoia was translated by educational management and exam committees into pressure on teachers like myself to use different evaluation formats. These same people now casually impart that, actually, they use ‘AI’ because they simply don’t have the time to write. This admission comes only after they’re unmasked as impostors; the automated speeches contained no disclosure of what the rector calls this “useful tool” and the Estonian president wasn’t told he was listening to machine excrement. While it is at least out in the open that the ChatvB prefers brainless chatter over intelligence, at stake here is the credibility of the university’s aim for ‘positive impact’.

Let’s start with the brainless chatter. If ‘AI’ is a ‘useful tool’, that is surely because it allows the ChatvB to get to brainless bullshit quicker. Indeed, why waste time producing empty signifiers like ‘excellence’ or ‘impact’? Why study before spitting out fluffy sentences regarding ‘academic freedom’? (On this topic I offered the ChatvB assistance last year, but I now understand their preference for working with robots). That humans are in the loop makes matters worse: their syntax surviving, brainless bots are apparently equivalent to this kind of human leadership. But surely, you may think, we need compassion for people under pressure? Indeed. For students and teachers. Not for ‘leaders’ who are, after all, supposed to lead.

Anyone who has done some serious reading on ‘AI’ should by now know that ‘AI’ is neither artificial nor intelligent. We’re dealing with brainless statistical syntax machines, built on lots of human labor. The dominant connectionist paradigm of ‘AI’ means the concentration of technology and capital in a few companies with the capacity to scrape huge amounts of unfiltered data, for which they need: 1. Cheap, exploitative and traumatizing labor for data annotation and labelling, often found in the Global South; 2. Huge amounts of electricity and water, often also at the expense of poor communities in the Global South. People who know what they’re talking about, like Iris van Rooij (Radboud University), therefore emphasize that what passes for artificial intelligence is in fact a highly unethical practice.

Acceptance of ‘AI’ as a ‘useful tool’ contradicts everything this university claims to stand for: “positive societal impact,” or “a positive and sustainable contribution to solving (…) complex societal challenges” (I’m actually not sure if one ‘solves’ a challenge, but I won’t argue with bots). To use ‘AI’ is to participate in exploitation and extraction. It fills the coffers of fascist corporate elites. It’s everything one should not do if ‘positive impact’ has even an ounce of meaning. That’s why the attitude of Rens Bod, cited in EM, is so pernicious: “If you say that you use AI and you don’t plagiarise by accident, then I personally have no problem with it.” Well, there’s a planetary problem here, Rens. But wait, is it Bod or Bot?

Those who concoct ‘AI’ provide clues that it is not conducive to good relations on and with the Earth. They keep warning us of the potential annihilation of humanity they help bring about. They’re obviously fishing for venture capital, but any sane person would conclude these people are delusional and/or downright dangerous. Not the members of the ChatvB who, unfortunately like so many people seeking refuge from intelligence, simply go: ‘Huh! Useful tool!’

Of course, the Western way of life always means pissing on other people and the planet. That is how we’re infrastructurally wired. But that is not yet the case for ‘AI’: nothing is inescapable here. The ChatvB contributes to a false technological determinism when decisions need to be made regarding how the university relates to brainless syntax machines. After multiple platform-dependencies and giving Microsoft control of our labor, the ChatvB now uncritically accepts the marketed inevitability of ‘AI’.

The world is on fire in so many ways, but the ChatvB descends from semantics to syntax, from meaning to brainless bullshit. Mind you, the ChatvB will increasingly be spitting out speeches regarding academic-military collaboration – a brainless effort to begin with, but even more dangerous if bots produce the syntax. Meanwhile, all connection to life is lost underneath hollow ‘impact’ slogans that, it turns out, a brainless syntax machine can just as easily produce.

Instead, why not practice thoughtful selectivity in networked dependency? More than ever, disconnecting from predatory platforms and fascist ‘AI’ phantasmagoria is what we, staff and students, need to learn. Call me naive.