The American Federation of Teachers National Drinks the Kool-Aid
Dispatches from the AI Dystopia
by Ian Duckles
It was with great dismay that I read this recent press release from the American Federation of Teachers (the national branch of my local) announcing their $23 million partnership with various AI companies including Microsoft (Copilot), OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Anthropic (Claude) to “address the gap in structured, accessible AI training and provide a national model for AI-integrated curriculum and teaching that puts educators in the driver’s seat.” Over the next five years they intend to indoctrinate 10% of educators in the US who are responsible for educating 7.2 million students.
The press release is filled with the usual nonsense about how AI can “revolutionize” education and according to AFT National President Randi Weingarten, “AI holds tremendous promise but huge challenges—and it’s our job as educators to make sure AI serves our students and society, not the other way around.” The press release continues with the standard claims I have heard in a million workshops that AI will help teachers, “to learn, to think, and to create [this was covered quite well in my Ph.D. program, thank you very much, also, how does it help me think?],” and assist “with educator workflow [whatever that is supposed to mean].” I threw up a little bit in my mouth.
To say I am disgusted by this announcement is an understatement, and frankly I feel as if my national union sold me out for $23 million (Microsoft alone is planning to spend $80 billion this year solely on infrastructure for AI. $23 million represents less than .03% of that). I actually thought the national leadership was smarter than this. Here is a little reality. Currently, no AI company is profitable. These elaborate autocorrection programs (and that is all that Large Language Models are) are neat tricks, but other than facilitating massive cheating in the classroom, they are essentially useless. I have attended hours of workshops on incorporating AI in the classroom, and I have not found a single use case for AI that doesn’t increase my workload as I check for hallucinations or makes me a worse instructor by degrading my critical thinking skills and reducing my grasp and understanding of the material I teach.
This is about these companies trying to steal a piece of public education money and direct that wealth to their own coffers. They will train educators to rely on AI. Recent research has shown that the more people rely on AI, the less critical thinking they exercise and the more dependent they become on it. Essentially, they are going to addict educators to AI so that they no longer know how to teach without it and then sell them AI solutions to do the work that they used to do themselves. The study linked above was actually conducted by Microsoft and concluded that, “higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking,” and “Our insights reveal new design challenges and opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.” What better way to increase confidence in GenAI and what better opportunity for knowledge work than indoctrinating 10% of educators who will then pass that indoctrination on to 7.2 million students?
The AFT press release goes on to claim that “the academy is a place where educators and school staff will learn about AI—not just how it works, but how to use it wisely, safely and ethically [the attribution of this quotation is unclear, but I think this is Randi Weingarten].” This is utter nonsense. Apparently, the AFT leadership is unfamiliar with conflicts of interest. The curriculum in question will be designed by Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, companies that have a financial incentive for people to use AI as much as possible. This is essentially the equivalent of having Big Tobacco run an institute that teaches responsible cigarette consumption.
This initiative will also provide these companies with massive education data sets that they can use to train future AI programs. I guarantee that sooner rather than later, they will offer these programs as inexpensive replacements for human teachers. The big tell comes in the concluding paragraph of the press release where we learn whose brilliant idea this all was: “The idea for the academy was first proposed by venture capitalist, educator, activist and AFT member Roy Bahat. He is currently the head of Bloomberg Beta, the venture capital arm of Bloomberg, and will be joining the academy’s board of directors.” So, the AFT National has sold out education to a venture capitalist who couldn’t possibly be looking for a return on his investment.
Beyond all this, AI is a tool of ideological indoctrination. The companies that design these autocorrect programs are not creating ideologically neutral autocorrection (as if such a thing were possible). Though not involved in the announcement, Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, has recently been manipulated by its programmers to promote extreme antisemitic content including ringing endorsements of Adolph Hitler and calling for a second holocaust against the Jews. Even the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that lost enormous credibility trying to excuse Elon Musk’s Sieg Heil salutes at Trump’s second inauguration, was compelled to denounce this.
The key point here is that the people who create, deploy, and control these technologies use them as tools of ideological indoctrination. While Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude are more subtle than Grok, they absolutely reflect the will and ideologies of the massive corporations that create them. By aligning with these corporations, AFT National endorses these corrupt, anti-worker agendas, and sets itself up as a willing vector of this corporate indoctrination. As I wrote in an earlier article, AI is evil and should never be used by anyone ever, and this includes the AFT national.
Ian Duckles teaches philosophy at San Diego Mesa College and is an active member of the union there (AFT Guild 1931) that represents most of the workers.