Christine M. Nowik, Ph.D.

I love them and their boundaries and have high hopes for workplace transformations as the result!

Please know, there are people on the "AI Leadership Group," including me, whose research relates to harms of generative AI, AI literacy in the sense of negative impacts & critical media studies. We spend tremendous amounts of time pushing back and advocating for faculty & students who are concerned.

This sentiment helped me understand book banning in my own community. If your truth can be distilled down to one text, of course you'll find others threatening.

Study after study shows that using LLMs is bad for cognition, bad for learning, bad for understanding, bad for mental health. So why are our schools and universities still relentlessly pushing them?

The rhetoric has been about training students for the economy of tomorrow. Yet when employers always, *always*, year after year, say they want their workers trained in the skills that Humanities and Social Sciences teach, somehow that never turns into more investment in those programs.

HACCEA- Harrisburg Area Community College Education Association HACCEA, the Harrisburg Area Community College Education Association, is the faculty union at HACC, dedicated to educating students in central Pennsylvania and beyond.

Really proud of the work we are doing at haccea.org We launched a micro course!

We are unpacking our contract negotiations w as much clarity as possible after two strike days last week.

We shall see what this week brings! #solidarity

cannot believe on some level I & my colleagues have turned the tide on this, but also it was in some senses inevitable as why not! Humans can do anything; we still have a way to go however of course, but:

banning AI in the classroom should be as uncontroversial as banning calculators in early maths

Quiet Quitting "It’s not just that we’re overdue for a re-calibration. We’re overdue for a revolution." ~Amelia Nagoski

Someone just liked this post from 2022 so I read it again to check relevance.

Yeah. Shattering resonance here in 2025 on the matter of power and the "quiet quitting" discourse in orgs.

open.substack.com/pub/christin...

Realizing that part of the reason universities’ uncritical pushing AI into everything bothers me is that it is partly related to how little our institutions care about the humanities. Tech that might work in (some) fields does not need to be force fed to all of us. But who listens to us?

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

The prevalence rate of psychopathy in the general adult population is 4.5%.

That’s about one out of every 22 adults.

In case anyone was wondering.

Psychopathy is often more concentrated among people in leadership positions.

🧪 A new position piece argues that the uncritical adoption of 'AI' in academia mirrors past collective blunders.

Fueled by industry hype, they posit this trend erodes critical thinking, academic freedom, and scientific integrity.
#AcademicSky #MLSky

Exactly...it is super irritating that there has been so much uncritical adoption of genAI and that governments seem to have swallowed the industry hype.

"The owners had always been antagonistic to the union, but as time went on, their allegiance to their own authority became clear...."

Resharing a 🧵 for the Labor Day morning crowd on why it's essential to teach young people about the labor abuses that make GenAI possible, now with excerpts from my own morning reading of Karen Hao's Empire of AI. #EduSky

U.S. tech stocks slide after Altman warns of AI bubble and MIT study casts doubt on the hype Investors’ long-running enthusiasm for artificial intelligence showed signs of faltering on Tuesday as tech stocks tumbled.

The 'bubble' is definitely the wrong metaphor for this whole thing. Even if the stock values slide, the hype dissipates and the headlines vanish, there will still be a massive energy hunger locked in, along with a swathe of new fossil infrastructure projects that'll stick around for decades

"Losing this much money is actively impressive; both the stock market and bitcoin hit all-time highs well after 2021." 💀

The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started Was your kid’s report card written by a chatbot?

If the AI takeover of education is indeed just getting started then it's really important to highlight why this could be bad, not just accept the unevidenced assumptions it will be good for education.

21 reasons to argue against AI in education coming up 🧵 www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

"Stringer noted that real officers do not wear ski masks."

I’mma be real with y’all, I am holding this grudge big time.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/o...

Great thread that's still going. Join me for how it develops in progress.

Things i didn't go into education to be (presented in order of best rhetorical impact):

1) a shill for tech company marketing hype
2) a cop surveiling my students & trying to "catch" anyone who falls for the tech co. marketing hype permeating their entire sociocultural milieu

So you see my dilemma

Again.

Yup. It might be a time to, idk, take your old course material off blackboard and canvas. Bc some universities are already training on it. And others will once it gets out. Students posting material to chegg and chatgpt has nothing on your employer wanting to pay less for instruction.

"Your job in this class is to become a better reader, writer, and thinker. Look around these days. We need more of you! To do this, you’re going to have to read, write, think, and talk . . . a lot. And my job in this class is to provide you with the information, support, and feedback to help you meet that goal. And guess what else? Writing is one of the most deeply human things you can do. It’s meaningful. It matters. I care less about your writing being “perfect” than about it coming from you, with your voice, using evidence you find compelling. Because of all this, the use of any AI tool (including Grammarly, sorry!) to produce any written work in this class is not permitted and will result in a score of 0 on the assignment. Here’s the deal: AI doesn’t generate. It doesn’t build. It doesn’t edify what we’re out here doing as human beings. It scrapes together what’s already there and pulls it together in a boring and formulaic way. It steals ideas, art, and phrases from real human people without proper citation. It outsources thinking and pollutes our planet. So we’re just not going to use it. I know this sounds a little scary, but this policy should encourage you to be the vibrant, curious, and badass thinker I absolutely know you are."

took a stab at a first draft of a new AI policy for my classes this year (heavily leaning on @heymrsbond.com and @williamfleitch.bsky.social)

"This ongoing bending to pressures that run counter to our deeply held educational and ethical beliefs makes me wonder if we’re experiencing a collective moral injury in higher education."

Microsoft is so not mad about "AI" becoming synonymous bad writing that they hired someone to tell you that's actually very classist of you and you should check your privilege.

Despite how it FELT, "The study found that "AI" actually decreased productivity (by 19%)."

Just vibes

We have decided to ban the use of GenAI for research, writing & creative work at our organization.

In fact, we make people sign an agreement saying that their research, analysis, writing, and creative work are *theirs* and not done by GenAI.