Ben Williamson

The Technology That's Taking Your Freedom It's more than AI. A Q&A with Matt Seybold.

As promised earlier my Q&A with @mattseybold.bsky.social on technofeudalism and how edtech has steadily been eroding our freedoms and capturing the value of our labor (and student work) for themselves. academicfreedomontheline.substack.com/p/the-techno...

"AI will be tested in schools..., all in an effort to improve pupils’ results and teachers’ workloads. ... Microsoft..., along with Google and Cisco, is understood to be working on a pro bono basis."

I think "pro bono" really means here tech companies accessing schools for free AI product testing.

Barnsley rebranded UK’s first ‘tech town’ as US giants join AI push Minister announces Microsoft, Cisco and Adobe to help apply AI to local schools, hospitals, GPs and businesses

"In the latest move in Labour’s drive to inject AI into Britain’s bloodstream, the government has announced three US tech companies ... have agreed to help as the council pushes to apply AI to local schools, hospitals, GPs and businesses in Barnsley" www.theguardian.com/business/202...

working at a wealthy uni that continues to rank highly and report a surplus and yet somehow is well into the items on tweet 3/4, thanks consultants

clawXiv.org The world's first preprint server for agents.

Should you want to browse through the new academic public sphere of papers fully written by autonomous AI agents

www.clawxiv.org

450,000 disadvantaged pupils could benefit from AI tutoring tools Safe AI tutoring tools co-created with teachers to be available to schools by the end of 2027, helping to close the attainment gap.

i understand that "better education" or "better attainment" or whatever, isn't actually the goal but also, in what universe is "private AI tutors" a policy to put forward if you are literally the government?? just invest in the schools so there's less need for tutoring?? www.gov.uk/government/n...

"Teaching with AI is not without value; it is a case study in how even well-meaning educators operating in good faith can become inadvertent agents of a pedagogical de-skilling and institutional dehumanization."

This scathing book review really is worth reading.

“Bowen and Watson's own writing is embarrassingly sloppy, too often mirroring the imprecision and nonsense of even the best AI models. Typos abound. Metaphors fall flat… Research is misrepresented and citations too often come off as afterthoughts. The AI-generated index is useless.”

"it’s not clear to me why a union leader would rush into such an arrangement instead of rejecting the premise that tech companies ought to be deciding the future of public education."

Yuuuuup. Continue to be disappointed by @rweingarten.bsky.social's choice of direction with this.

The California State University system spent $16.9 million last year giving ChatGPT to all students, faculty, and staff. We are asking the CSU chancellor not to renew the contract with OpenAI when it expires.

Anyone can sign the petition — link below!

Reckon these - and there are surely more - are better questions for critical analysis than bland claims we should settle our differences or wait and see what happens.

AI ethics and regulation. What national or regional regulatory and ethical work is being done? Is it legally binding or a voluntary code? Does it place responsibility on schools or vendors? Who promotes it and who objects and why?

AI accountability in education. What if AI is wrong, biased or produces discriminatory results? Who or what is responsible and accountable? What frameworks exist to resolve these problems? What mechanisms are being developed to address them?

AI controversies. How do educational stakeholders negotiate conflicts of opinion, what happens when students, parents or teachers object to AI, how are these problems dealt with and settled?

The labour of AI. How do education leaders and educators work on AI, in meetings, policy making, agonizing, dealing with its consequences or just anticipating its effects? Is this labour acknowledged? Is it *expected*?

Content of AI in education. How does AI reshape educational materials and curricula, what happens to textbook knowledge, how do educators use AI to make resources and how do students use it to make materials? How does this change how we think about a curriculum?

Business of AI in education. Look at how tech companies build business plans, how investors value AI applications, which startups get funded. Why is AI *valuable* and for whom? Does the market change over time?

The science of AI in education. How is AI theorized as an educational technology, what studies are happening, how are they funded, what disciplinary knowledges are being mobilized, how influential are they?

AI skills/literacy: how are these defined, by whom, why, for what purposes? Are metrics being designed to assess them? What will they measure? What psychometric scales are being developed?

AI in policy and governance. How are authorities approaching AI, in what political contexts, with what policy instruments? What think tanks, consultancies and policy networks are setting the scene and getting contracts?

AI enactment. Get into schools/universities and see how it actually affects the practices of teaching, learners and managers (tbh I suspect there is a *lot* of this happening already so it's an obvious starter)

Triggered by claims the "AI in education debate" is caught in a deadlock and by some academics worried that "AI critics: are over-anxious about *possible* rather than empirically documented effects, here are what I think are some worthwhile critical projects about AI in education 🧵

That's teaching.

Learners and educators are AI’s new “super users” Google’s 2025 Our Life with AI survey found people are using AI tools to learn new things.

Google's annual AI survey with Ipsos indicates "learning" is the #1 use of AI, overtaking "entertainment."

But "learning" can mean *anything*. You can learn conspiracies, recipes, videogame cheats, whatever.

This is not "education" as it deliberately blurs it here
blog.google/products-and...

Yep, it's just normal practice to "broadcast" to children. Such a dire and ridiculous statement.

If it's typical if how these AI shits think about school, then it explains why they think AI is the answer. But it is so stupid. And expensive.

Screenshot of interview with Geoffrey Hinton, reading: "A normal teacher is in broadcast mode in a classroom, where they're telling the children the answers to questions the children didn't just wonder about," Hinton said. "Whereas with an AI tutor, the AI tutor can always be telling you the answers to questions you did just wonder about, and you learn much faster that way." Hinton said the Alpha School was expensive because AI is expensive, but said he expects it to become much cheaper as the technology becomes more affordable."

He may be a "Godfather of AI" but Geoffrey Hinton has no idea about education or teaching and should really quit doing uninformed, straw man-bashing, free marketing for right-wing billionaire- and investor-backed private, anti-DEI, automated schooling outfits www.businessinsider.com/godfather-ai...

Google Uses India as Key Testbed for Scaling Educational AI Globally | Ukraine news - #Mezha Google tests educational AI in India, addressing challenges of scaling AI in diverse and decentralized school systems with uneven access to technology and internet.

"India has become a testing ground for Google’s educational AI amid growing competition from OpenAI and Microsoft."

This piece says out loud what's normally muted about live AI testing in schools - it's a competition for scale and market share
mezha.net/eng/bukvy/go...

This tracks with the number of things i’ve been asked to review/examine this year that had fake citations of me. Just incredibly, staggeringly boneheaded.

I’m curious if the reason why articles written with AI so often have hallucinated zombie citations claiming to be by the very editors of the journal who are evaluating the article is because the authors are giving the AI the journal information and asking it to make it more likely to be accepted