The intellectual bankruptcy of anti-AI academic alarmism: a rebuttal

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Teaching in Higher Education

Abstract

This article presents a concise rebuttal to the anti-AI academic alarmism advanced by Flenady and Sparrow, whose arguments – though influential in the humanities – misapply philosophical categories, romanticize higher education’s past, and disregard economic realities shaping contemporary universities. Their invocation of Frankfurt’s ‘bullshit’ conflates human intent with the statistical, accuracy-driven nature of generative AI. Through a framing of ‘moral agency’ as a prerequisite for knowledge transmission and restricting terms like ‘collaborator’ or ‘tutor’ to humans, they ignore centuries of learning mediated by non-agential tools and the dynamic evolution of educational language. Their idealized vision of authentic teacher-student relationships fails to account for the massified, impersonal structures that define real-world universities. Finally, their framing of student responsibility as a ‘perverse’ burden undermines agency and critical thinking, while their call for exclusively human instruction disregards the necessity of scalable, equitable models in an era of soaring demand and resource constraints.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2025.2562594

Publication Date

9-2025

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